Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions 3031806034, 9783031806032

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LITERARY DISABILITY STUDIES

Literary Neurodiversity Studies Current and Future Directions

Bradley J. Irish

Literary Disability Studies

Series Editors David Bolt, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK Elizabeth J. Donaldson, Arizona State University, Queen Creek, USA Julia Miele Rodas, Bronx Community College, City University of New York, Bronx, USA

Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length). The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies: Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA; G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, USA; Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Emory University, Atlanta, USA; Cynthia LewieckiWilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University, Ohio, USA. For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact the series editors: David Bolt ([email protected]), Elizabeth J. Donaldson ([email protected]), and/or Julia Miele Rodas ([email protected]).

Bradley J. Irish

Literary Neurodiversity Studies Current and Future Directions

Bradley J. Irish Arizona State University Tempe, AZ, USA

ISSN 2947-7409 ISSN 2947-7417 (electronic) Literary Disability Studies ISBN 978-3-031-80602-5 ISBN 978-3-031-80603-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.

To everyone who reads, writes, studies, teaches, and loves literature in their own beautiful way

Acknowledgements

I could not have written this book without a wonderful community of scholars, activists, and friends. I obviously am indebted to everyone who has contributed to the development of literary neurodiversity studies, but the following names are some of the people who have particularly offered me help, guidance, and inspiration along the way: Jes Battis, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Paul Cefalu, Robert Chapman, Alice Equestri, Wes Folkerth, Cora Fox, Lianne Habinek, Nic Helms, Allison Hobgood, Lalita Hogan, Patrick Hogan, Mardy Philippian, Ralph Savarese, Lani Shiota, Anna Stenning, Nick Walker, David Houston Wood, and M. Remi Yergeau. Special thanks is owed to Laura Seymour and Sonya Freeman Loftis, two of the luminaries of our field, who have given me endless support. I want to especially recognize the graduate students and early career researchers who will form the next generation of literary neurodiversity studies: scholars like Bridget Bartlett, Deyasini Dasgupta, Olivia Henderson, Catherine Kerton-Johnson, Melinda Marks, Edward Mills, Emily Nicholls, Nathan Pensky, and M.L. Rio are already shaping the future of the field, and their brilliance is endlessly inspiring. (And there are many more names out there, of course, that I don’t yet know, but look forward to learning from soon!) I am very appreciative that David Bolt, Elizabeth Donaldson, and Julia Miele Rodas found a home for my work in their groundbreaking series. I thank Molly Beck and the entire team at Palgrave—especially the anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved the manuscript. And as always, I owe everything to my friends and family. vii

Contents

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Introduction: What Is Neurodiversity? Neurodiversity: The Basics The Aims and Scope of This Book

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Literary Neurodiversity: The Present

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Literary Neurodiversity: A Future?

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Case Study: Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence in Othello

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Conclusion: The Future of Neurodiversity

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Appendix: Bibliography of Literary Neurodiversity Studies Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: What Is Neurodiversity?

Abstract This chapter sets the stage for the book to come. Besides describing the author’s own neurodivergence journey, it offers an introduction to the basic concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergence as well as a general overview of neurodiversity studies as a scholarly field. It concludes by presenting an outline of the book’s contents. Keywords Neurodiversity · Neurodivergence · Neurodiversity studies · Neurodiversity paradigm

This book emerges from a very transformative personal experience. In August 2022, on the day before my 40th birthday, I learned that I am autistic and have ADHD. While medical diagnosis, we will see, is an incredibly complex (and often problematic, if not violent) thing, hearing this assessment from an evaluating psychiatrist was a life-changing moment. I had always known that I was somewhat “quirky” (or, as I had often less charitably thought, “weird,” or even “off”), but learning that my brain and body just happen to work a bit differently gave me a feeling of existential relief: it was like a light-switch suddenly flicked on for the first time, and all at once virtually every aspect of my life instantly made so much more sense.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 B. J. Irish, Literary Neurodiversity Studies, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2_1

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From that moment on, I became incredibly invested in learning about my own neurodivergence, and this brought about a professional shift as well. I immediately disclosed my autism to my academic institution, as well as more publicly on social media; soon, I was welcomed into a remarkable international community of neurodivergent and disabled scholars, and I began taking steps to advocate for neurodivergent faculty, students, and academic professionals. (See, for example, my article “How to Make Room for Neurodivergent Professors,” published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in March 2023.)1 As I became more versed in the ways that neurodivergence impacted life in academia, I also found myself curious about neurodivergence as a topic of scholarly inquiry— and before long, I was devouring everything I could find in the small, but rapidly growing field of literary neurodiversity studies. This was paradigm-shifting. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I tell you more about me and my neurodivergent journey, or about literary neurodiversity studies, or about the aims of this project, I should set the stage more explicitly. You may have picked up this book because you’re already invested in the academic study of neurodiversity—but I suspect that many readers will be somewhat less familiar with the concept. (Perhaps you have a casual sense of what neurodiversity entails, but have never read more specifically about the matter.) Accordingly, I think it’s a good idea to start by outlining some core ideas about neurodiversity and neurodiversity theory, so that we’re on the same page. This is important not only so that we have a shared basic vocabulary for what follows, but also so that you know how I specifically understand neurodiversity—because, appropriately enough for the topic, my own approach to neurodiversity theory cannot help but be shaped by the various idiosyncrasies of my particular neurodivergent mind. (I should also say that my particular understanding of neurodiversity and neurodivergence is also inevitably influenced by the fact that I am a white, middle-class, cisheterosexual man—because, as we’ll see, one’s neurological identity is complexly entwined with other aspects of one’s social identity.) But while there are many different ways to approach specific issues in neurodiversity studies, it’s also possible to

1 Bradley J. Irish, “How to Make Room for Neurodivergent Professors,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2023. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-makeroom-forneurodivergent-professors.

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set out some foundational points of general agreement, and that’s what I’ll try to present now.

Neurodiversity: The Basics To understand neurodiversity, we must begin with the prefix neuro, a term that refers not only to the workings of the brain, but also more broadly to the workings of the nervous system: the idea of neurodiversity thus concerns the neurological functioning of people. The nervous system is an incredibly complex thing, which governs all sorts of ways that human minds (and the bodies they are entwined with) experience and inhabit their world; neurology concerns not only how the brain itself works, but also how the brain receives and processes stimuli from the rest of the body and subsequently coordinates action among those bodily systems. It can be a bit tricky to get a concrete sense of what this practically entails, but I like the explanation of Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Nick Chown, and Anna Stenning, editors of the foundational collection Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm, who broadly associate neurology with cognitive, emotional, and sensory processes.2 This triad of cognition, emotion, and sensation is at the center of my own understanding of neurodiversity, and you’ll see that it is central to the arguments that I develop as this book unfolds. Neurological functioning, then, can be understood to refer to the way that minds and bodies do things like think, feel, and sense, both as these processes are experienced in an internal subjective way, as well as how those processes contribute to how individuals interact with (and are subsequently shaped by) the cultural, social, and material worlds they inhabit. Once again, though the idea of neurology and neurons is often most immediately associated with brains and minds, it is vital to remember that we can’t meaningfully decouple human minds from the rest of the body; for this reason, many scholars working on neurodiversity refer to their collective operation via the term bodymind, a concept first developed by disability scholar

2 Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Anna Stenning, and Nick Chown, “Introduction,” in Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm, ed. Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Nick Chown, and Anna Stenning (New York: Routledge, 2020), 1.

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Margaret Price.3 (Thus neurodiversity doesn’t only refer to the qualities of “inner” mental experiences: it can also concern other ways of being in the world, such as forms of speech or forms of movement.) As theorist Nick Walker crucially notes, the neurological diversity of bodyminds is not simply “an approach, a belief, a political position, or a paradigm”—it is actually an empirical, “biological fact” that applies to the entire human population.4 For this reason, neurodiversity has long been seen as analogous to biodiversity: “just as all of nature is part of biodiversity, so all people belong to a neurodiverse group of humans, with each contributing to social functioning and evolution.”5 For good reason, humanist students of neurodiversity usually maintain a good deal of skepticism toward the empirical sciences and their treatment of neurology—because, as scholars like M. Remi Yergeau, James McGrath, and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer have documented (and as we will further see below), scientific and medical approaches to neurology have historically led to the pathologization and marginalization of neurological difference.6 While some areas of scientific thought are adopting a more progressive attitude toward neurodiversity, progress on this front can be slow; indeed, in an essay called “Against Neurodiversity,” neuroscientist Moheb Costandi has recently suggested that the fundamental outlook of the neurodiversity approach is “at odds with scientific understanding!”7 So while I’m definitely not suggesting that humanists should 3 See Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 268–84. 4 Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Fort Worth: Autonomous Press, 2021), 34. 5 Ibid.; David Jackson-Perry and Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, “An Introduction to Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies, ed. Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and David Jackson-Perry (Cham: Springer, 2024), 4. 6 See M. Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); James McGrath, Naming Adult Autism: Culture, Science, Identity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017); Matthew J. WolfMeyer, Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 7 Moheb Costandi, “Against Neurodiversity,” AEON , 12 September 2019: https:// aeon.co/essays/why-the-neurodiversity-movement-has-become-harmful. For even more recent scientific work that embraces neurodiversity, see, for example, Ruth Monk, Andrew J. O. Whitehouse, and Hannah Waddington, “The Use of Language in Autism Research,”

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adopt an uncritical deference to the positivist sciences, I do think that the invocation of biology above can still be instructive, as the perspective of neurodiversity theory can be equally seen to align with other kinds of scientific thinking. (And to be further clear, I’m not saying that humanist neurodiversity theory needs the epistemological warrant of the sciences— but, as a transdisciplinary scholar, I always think it’s both notable and exciting when ideas correspond across unrelated intellectual traditions.) I have some scholarly background in psychology, so I find particularly helpful the idea that human minds are biocultural: biocultural theory is an interdisciplinary scientific approach that emphasizes “the casual interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions.”8 While human brains, in a general sense, are formed during gestation according to a broadly universal, species-typical genetic blueprint, the biocultural outlook emphasizes that they inevitably develop (before and after birth) within particular physical and social environments, and these environmental contexts crucially affect the more precise ways that particular, individuated minds come to function. Furthermore, the relative plasticity of the brain means that physical and social environments continue to influence psychological functioning across the lifespan.9 So while certain aspects of our neurology stay pretty consistent, our brains are in no way “fixed”: as I mentioned above, I’ve grown and changed enormously since learning about my own neurodivergence! In other words, just like every human fingerprint, every human brain and every human mind are uniquely formed, and it is thus not at all trivial to say that neurological variety is literally limitless in the human population—hence Walker’s Trends in Neurosciences 45, no. 11 (2022): 791–93; Ava E. Axelrod and Jacob M. Hooker, “Bridging the Divide Between Reductionism and the Neurodiversity Movement,” ACS Chemical Neuroscience 13, no. 16 (2022): 2351–52; Jata K. Elliott, Kate Buchanan, and Sara Bayes, “The Neurodivergent Perinatal Experience—A Systematic Literature Review on Autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” Women and Birth 37, no. 6 (2024): article 101825; Hana D’Souza and Dean D’Souza, “Stop Trying to Carve Nature at Its Joints! The Importance of a Process-Based Developmental Science for Understanding Neurodiversity,” in Advances in Child Development and Behavior Vol. 66, ed. Chen Yu and Jeffrey J. Lockman (2024), 233–68; Bouke de Vries, “Neurodiversity and the Neuro-Neutral State,” AJOB Neuroscience 15, no. 4 (2024): 264–73. 8 Joseph Carroll et al., “Biocultural Theory: The Current State of Knowledge,” Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 11, no. 1 (2017): 2. On the brain as biocultural, see also Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024). 9 Beatrix P. Rubin, “Changing Brains: The Emergence of the Field of Adult Neurogenesis,” BioSocieties 4 (2009): 407–24.

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important observation about the “infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.”10 But even if people inherently vary in neurological functioning, the reality is that particular historical and cultural contexts tend to designate certain neurological styles as more “normal” than others: that is, there are neuronormative pressures suggesting that there are naturally regular ways that bodyminds are “supposed” to work. Because of this—and this is crucial for neurodiversity theory—individuals whose cognitive, emotional, and sensory functioning deviate from these norms tend to be pathologized, marginalized, and otherwise diminished by an ableist world that sees something “wrong” with their particular forms of neurological being. Two decades ago, Kassiane Asasumasu developed the terms neurodivergence and neurodivergent to account for such neurological styles that diverge from the presumed norms of a given cultural context; the opposite of neurodivergent is neurotypical . (Neurotypical people can be understood to comprise the neuromajority, whereas neurodivergent people comprise the neurominority, or particular neurominorities.) In advocating for the well-being and liberation of neurodivergent people, neurodiversity theory centrally aims to depathologize neurological difference, and vitally stresses that we should even abandon the concept of a neurological norm. Although certain neurological styles do statistically occur more regularly in the human population than others, it doesn’t mean that these styles are inherently more “normal” than others—just like, as Walker observes, it would be obviously wrong to call Han Chinese the “normal ethnicity” simply because there are more Han Chinese people on earth than any other ethnic group.11 What’s more, philosopher Robert Chapman has recently demonstrated how the very concept of medical normality is a modern (mythic) construction tied to the Industrial Revolution and the exploitive mechanisms of capitalism—so they argue, in fact, that “we must work towards a future world beyond the Empire of Normality,” because “the collective building of a mass anti-capitalist politics of neurodiversity will be necessary for not just neurodivergent liberation but also for our broader efforts towards collective liberation.”12 Neurodiversity theory, 10 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 34. 11 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 23. 12 Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (London:

Pluto Press, 2023), 165. For a foundational early critique of ableist normalcy, see Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995).

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then, works to unsettle the fundamental concept of a neurological norm, and to validate all forms of neurological being as equally natural and valuable; indeed, Laura Seymour importantly argues that referring to a “norm” isn’t even necessary for us to think about neurodivergence, as we can simply understand the concept to mean the various ways that people differ from each other in inhabiting the world.13 Walker calls the broad adoption of this anti-normative outlook the neurodiversity paradigm, and (with Ralph James Savarese) similarly uses the term neurocosmopolitanism to account for a perspective that not only accepts, but actively embraces and celebrates neurological diversity.14 Practically speaking, if you’ve ever encountered the concept of neurodivergence, it’s probably been in reference to specific medical, diagnostic labels like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or Tourette Syndrome. So I, for example, identify as neurodivergent, because my neurological being can be (partly) captured by the ideas of autism and ADHD. But these names, of course, do not signal any deep or essential truth about my neurology, because they are little more than particular, socially constructed concepts originating from the diagnostic framework of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific and medical thought—the same framework that has historically pathologized and marginalized neurological difference.15 13 Laura Seymour, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 4. This idea is suggested by Joel Casey. 14 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 12–80; Ralph James Savarese, “From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism: Beyond Mere Acceptance and Inclusion,” in Ethics and Neurodiversity, ed. C.D. Herrera and Alexandra Perry (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 191–205; Ralph James Savarese, “Neurocosmopolitan Melville,” Leviathan 15, no. 2 (2013): 7–19; Ralph James Savarese and Lisa Zunshine, “The Critic as Neurocosmopolite: Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese,” Narrative 22, no. 1 (2014): 17–44. 15 There is a great deal of research accounting for the historical development of autism, neurodiversity, and related concepts. See, for example, For the development of twentiethcentury medical concepts of neurodiversity, see, for example, Adam Feinstein, A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Kurt Jacobsen, “Diagnostic Politics: The Curious Case of Kanner’s Syndrome,” History of Psychiatry 21, no. 4 (2010): 436–54; Chloe Silverman, Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Berend Verhoeff, “Autism in Flux: A History of the Concept from Leo Kanner to DSM -5,” History of Psychiatry 24, no. 4 (2013): 442–58; Mical Raz, “Deprived of Touch: How Maternal and Sensory Deprivation Theory Converged in Shaping Early Debates Over Autism,” History

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Because of this, it’s very important to remember that neurodiversity theorists tend to be quite skeptical of such labels, even if we do have occasion to sometimes use them, for reasons of intellectual clarity, political strategy, or simple convenience. (Jacky [Manidoomakwakwe] Ellis, for example, has recently noted that it can be “strategically necessary” for autistic people “to appeal to existing narratives about Autism, or to emphasize solidarity within the Autistic community over the autism spectrum’s internal diversity.”)16 Also vital is the fact that theorists, in general, are extremely flexible and radically inclusive about what constitutes neurodiversity, and resist attempts to police or gatekeep who or what “counts” as neurodivergent. As Walker puts it, neurodivergence can refer to “any significant divergence from dominant cultural norms of neurocognitive functioning”—ranging, she writes, “from autism to dyslexia to dyspraxia to aphantasia to synesthesia to epilepsy to schizophrenia to PTSD to Williams Syndrome to the cool stuff that long-term meditation practice does to the brains of Buddhist monks.”17 To this we might add things like addiction, intellectual disability, traumatic brain injury, or neurological changes occasioned by substance use, to name just a few. Although much scholarly and activist work on neurodiversity has tended to center autism—there is indeed a related subfield of critical autism studies — the larger point is that theorists stress that there are many, many ways to be neurodivergent—and, more so, that an individual is neurodivergent if they understand themselves to be neurodivergent, whether or not

of the Human Sciences 27, no. 2 (2014): 75–96; Berend Verhoeff, “Stabilizing Autism: A Fleckian Account of the Rise of a Neurodevelopmental Spectrum Disorder,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46 (2014): 65–78; Steve Silberman, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015); Bonnie Evans, The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Edith Sheffer, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018); Christopher Sterwald and Jeffrey Baker, “Frosted Intellectuals: How Dr. Leo Kanner Constructed the Autistic Family,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 62, no. 4 (2019): 690–709; Marga Vicedo, Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021). 16 Jacky (Manidoomakwakwe) Ellis, “Imagining Neurodivergent Futures from the Belly of the Identity Machine: Neurodiversity, Biosociality, and Strategic Essentialism,” Autism in Adulthood: Challenges and Management 5, no. 3 (2023): 225. 17 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 48.

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they have been formally diagnosed with an explicit medical label.18 Some scholars of neurodiversity, we’ll see, deemphasize the idea of labels altogether; there are other ways, they suggest, that we can more appropriately account for neurological being. I just mentioned intellectual disability, and that brings us to another crucial bit of context: thinking about neurodiversity is intimately connected to thinking about disability, and the development of neurodiversity theory is anchored in activist and scholarly accounts of disability. As opposed to the medical model of disability—that is, the model that understands disability as “an impairment or defect which is seen as being located in the body and/or mind of an individual,” and that often treats it as a “problem” to be “cured”—the neurodiversity paradigm is generally premised on the social model of disability: In the social model, disabled is understood as the opposite of enabled. Society is set up to meet the needs of people with a specific set of traits, needs, and abilities. Those privileged people are abled, or enabled—in other words, society is set up to enable their participation. Within the social model of disability, when we say that a person is disabled, we mean that society isn’t properly set up to enable their participation, and instead is often set up in a way that creates barriers to their participation.19

18 For critical autism studies, see Lindsay O’Dell et al., “Critical Autism Studies: Exploring Epistemic Dialogues and Intersections, Challenging Dominant Understandings of Autism,” Disability & Society 31, no. 2 (2016): 166–79; Sonya Freeman Loftis, “Critical Autism Studies: The State of the Field,” Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 5, no. 1 (2023): Article 5; Damian Milton and Sara Ryan, eds., The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Autism Studies (New York: Routledge, 2023); David Jackson-Perry, “Critical Autism Studies: Roots and Branches,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies, ed. Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and David Jackson-Perry (Cham: Springer, 2024), 25–39. 19 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 61. It should be noted, however, that Chapman argues that the social model’s conceptualization of impairment is problematic for the neurodiversity paradigm, and argues instead that we should we pursue a third, “value-neutral model of disability” developed by Elizabeth Barnes. See Robert Chapman, “Neurodiversity, Disability, Wellbeing,” in Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Chown, and Stenning, Neurodiversity Studies, 57–72; Elizabeth Barnes, “Disability, Minority, and Difference,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 26, no. 4 (2009): 337–55; Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also the “cultural model” described in Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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So while neurodiversity theory emphasizes that there’s nothing “wrong” with neurodivergent people, that doesn’t mean that it discounts our ability to understand ourselves as “disabled”—because the world we live in, after all, isn’t generally accommodating to our particular atypical neurological styles. Accordingly, there is much overlap between the concept of neurodiversity and the concepts of intellectual disability and madness: thinkers like Brigit McWade, Damian Milton, Peter Beresford, and Micha Frazer-Carroll note the overlapping concerns of mad studies and neurodiversity studies, and important scholars working on issues of madness, able-mindedness, and intellectual disability, such as Price, Michael Bérubé, Mel Y. Chen, Therí Alyce Pickens, and Sami Schalk, often engage the specific topic of neurodivergence.20 Although not all forms of neurodivergence are inherently disabling—one might, for example, consider their eidetic memory or exceptional spacial reasoning skills to be a form of neurodivergence but not a form of disability— the basic fact is that the concept of neurodiversity is deeply anchored in activist and scholarly conversations about disability, and neurodiversity theory emerges from the larger context of disability theory: this is a vital intellectual genealogy that must not be obscured. Scholars of disability fundamentally forged the field of neurodiversity studies—and practically speaking, many scholars of neurodiversity consider themselves to be scholars of disability, just as much research on neurodiversity (in literary studies and beyond) has appeared in journals and edited collections more generally devoted to disability. The basic theoretical principles I have just described have been collectively developed by activists, educators, and researchers over the last three decades, to the point that we can now comfortably say that the study of neurodiversity is a recognizable area of academic inquiry. The concept of

20 Brigit McWade, Damian Milton, and Peter Beresford, “Mad Studies and Neurodiversity: A Dialogue,” Disability & Society 30, no. 2 (2015): 305–9; Micha Frazer-Carroll, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health (London: Pluto Press, 2023); Price, Mad at School; Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Mel Y. Chen, Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023); Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness: Mad Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).

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neurodiversity was first developed in online autism activist communities in the early 1990s, and entered into academic discourse at the end of the same decade.21 Subsequent theoretical, philosophical, and sociological work on neurodiversity has given rise to the emerging field of neurodiversity studies (sometimes designated critical neurodiversity studies)—a body of research most immediately anchored in critical disability studies, but also variously indebted to critical race theory, queer theory, medical humanities, and critical psychology.22 Beyond sociology and philosophy, in recent years the analysis of neurodivergence has “gained considerable traction in a wide range of fields, including medicine, human resource management, and education”—and it is, we’ll see, of growing importance to the study of literature.23 Many of the ideas I’ve described in this introduction were developed by scholars who explicitly see themselves as working within the field of critical neurodiversity studies, and we can’t underestimate its importance. But as this book is on literature, one immediate point should be clarified about the role of neurodiversity theory in literary studies. While the imminent publication of Jenny Bergenmar, Louise Creechan, and Anna Stenning’s collection Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture (2025) promises to more prominently bring the tenets of critical neurodiversity theory to the study of literary and cultural texts, there is also a practical sense in which scholarship on literature and neurodiversity in the last decade or so has adopted the specific outlooks of critical neurodiversity theory to different degrees, at

21 On the history of the neurodiversity movement, see Steven K. Kapp, ed., Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Monique Botha et al., “The Neurodiversity Concept Was Developed Collectively: An Overdue Correction on the Origins of Neurodiversity Theory,” Autism 28, no. 6 (2024): 1591–94. For work on autism and neurodiversity beyond academia, see Alyssa Zisk, “Critical Autism Studies Beyond Academia: An Annotated List,” Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 5, no. 1 (2023), https://doi.org/10.9707/28331508.1144. 22 For an overview, see Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Chown, and Stenning, Neurodiversity Studies; Anna Stenning and Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, “Neurodiversity Studies: Mapping out Possibilities of a New Critical Paradigm,” Disability & Society 36, no. 9 (2021): 1532–37. 23 Jackson-Perry and Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, “Introduction to Research Methods,” 4.

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least as that field is coming to be understood today.24 In other words, there currently can be some slight ambiguity in how the term “neurodiversity studies” is used in literary studies: the label often refers to a specific critical orientation that understands neurodiversity through a somewhat particular philosophical, theoretical, and political framework, but it can also refer more broadly (and more casually) to scholarship simply on the topic of neurodiversity. (This is analogous to how the term “Affect Studies” is sometimes used to refer to a rather precise form of poststructuralist theory, and is sometimes used more generally to refer to all research on emotion and affect, regardless of theoretical approach.) This is to say, not all work on literary neurodiversity inherently shares all the theoretical assumptions of those who understand themselves as working in the field of critical neurodiversity studies—and indeed, researchers working in critical neurodiversity studies do sometimes critique scholarship on neurodiversity (literary or otherwise) that doesn’t quite align with their perspective. I think that many would agree that there currently exists something of a geographical divide, with European-based scholars of neurodiversity often being more squarely anchored in the sociological and philosophical perspectives of critical neurodiversity studies and critical disability studies than their American counterparts—though this is, of course, in no way absolute. Whatever the case, as the field of critical neurodiversity studies and general scholarship on neurodiversity continue to develop, these relationships will undoubtedly continue to be negotiated; it may be that there comes to be a clear and firm distinction between neurodiversity studies and critical neurodiversity studies , analogous to how some scholars understand a distinction between disability studies and critical disability studies.25 In terms of my approach, I take a deliberately wide and inclusive view of literary neurodiversity—this, it seems to me, is the best and most appropriate way of tending to the topic of neurodiversity, and it is the manner that best aligns with the particular features of my neurodivergent mind. This means, practically speaking, that I don’t adopt only the philosophical and theoretical outlooks that tend to underpin critical neurodiversity studies, though this field is still absolutely essential to the 24 Jenny Bergenmar, Louise Creechan, and Anna Stenning, eds., Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2025). 25 See Julie Avril Minich, “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016), n.p.; Sami Schalk, “Critical Disability Studies as Methodology,” Lateral 6, no. 1 (2017), n.p.

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development of my own thinking. This decision to be sure, has both positive and negative consequences. While it is beneficial, I think, to approach the topic of literary neurodiversity in terms of new perspectives and possibilities, it is also true that an earlier reader of this project, whose approach to neurodiversity was more thoroughly anchored in critical neurodiversity studies per se, took issue with some of my more specific ideas and characterizations. I thus acknowledge that some readers already versed in the nuts and bolts of neurodiversity theory might emphasize different matters and positions if they were to write their own survey of literary neurodiversity, and I think that’s quite alright; this short book is the first to cover the topic, but it is my hope that many more will follow. I’ll just conclude by reaffirming my belief that, in terms of scholarship and theory, diversity of thought about neurodiversity is only a good thing, and I (of course) cannot escape the fact that my own approach to the topic is simply the one that makes the most sense to me, and is no way intended to be authoritative or exclusionary. I see productive, good-faith intellectual disagreement as both healthy and vital to the development of the field, and some of the scholars of neurodiversity whom I most deeply respect have basic outlooks and perspectives on certain aspects of the topic that don’t entirely align with my own. One final, somewhat idiosyncratic thing remains to be said—because there is an important misconception that needs to be corrected about neurodivergence, specifically with regard to autism. You may have heard of a concept called Theory of Mind (ToM), which basically refers to a person’s ability to recognize that another individual’s internal life (thoughts, emotions, intentions, beliefs, desires, etc.) is different from one’s own. In the 1980s, a group of scholars began to argue that certain kinds of neurodivergent people, particularly those with autism, suffer from a ToM impairment—that is, autistic people were said to experience mindblindness , or the inability to understand the mental state of others.26 This perspective became incredibly influential, and would shape 26 The origin of this theory is with Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith, “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?” Cognition 21, no. 1 (1985): 37–46; Baron-Cohen’s name became synonymous with the position, as he elaborated the theory in subsequent works; see, for example, Simon Baron-Cohen, “Autism: A Specific Cognitive Disorder of ‘Mind-Blindness’,” International Review of Psychiatry 2, no. 1 (1990): 81–90; Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). According to GoogleScholar, as of January 2025 the 1985 paper has been cited 14217 times.

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both public and scholarly discourse on autism in the subsequent decades; it also informed work in cognitive literary studies in the early twenty-first century. The problem, however, is that this outlook rests on shaky grounds, and scholars both inside and out of neurodiversity studies have demonstrated that it is probably quite misguided to believe that autistic people inherently experience ToM impairment.27 Some of the earlier assertions of this perspective are both laughable and offensive in the extent to which they pathologize neurodivergence and dehumanize neurodivergent people—the blurb for Simon Baron-Cohen’s 1995 book Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind states that “for [autistic] children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things”—and more recent analysis reveals that while autistic individuals often do worse on some ToM tasks than neurotypical individuals, there is little conclusive empirical evidence that links autism with mindblindness or wildly limited ToM.28 Milton has influentially reframed the matter in terms of the “double empathy problem”: it’s not that autistic people are “deficient” when it comes to interacting with neurotypical individuals, but rather that “differences in neurology…produce differences in sociality,” so while “autistic people often lack insight about [neurotypical] perceptions and culture…it is equally the case that [neurotypical] people lack insight into the minds and cultures of ‘autistic people.’”29 Other neuroscientists, in fact, have argued (in an outlook called Intense World Theory)

27 See, for example, John Duffy and Rebecca Dorner, “The Pathos of ‘Mindblindness’: Autism, Science, and Sadness in ‘Theory of Mind’ Narratives,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 201–15; Damian E.M. Milton, “On the Ontological Status of Autism: The ‘Double Empathy Problem,’” Disability & Society 27, no. 6 (2012): 883–87; M. Remi Yergeau, “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind,” Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2013): https://dsqsds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/3876/3405; Janette Dinishak, “The Deficit View and Its Critics,” Disability Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2016), https://dsq-sds.org/index. php/dsq/article/view/5236/4475; M. Remi Yergeau and Bryce Huebner, “Minding Theory of Mind,” Journal of Social Philosophy 48, no. 3 (2017): 273–96; Morton Ann Gernsbacher and M. Remi Yergeau, “Empirical Failures of the Claim That Autistic People Lack a Theory of Mind,” Archives of Scientific Psychology 7, no. 1 (2019): 102–18. 28 Gernsbacher and Yergeau, “Empirical Failures.” See Shihuan Gao, Xieshun Wang, and Yanjie Su, “Examining Whether Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Encounter Multiple Problems in Theory of Mind: A Study Based on Meta-Analysis,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: A Journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc. 30, no. 5 (2023): 1740–58. 29 Milton, “On the Ontological Status of Autism,” 886.

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that autistic people have particularly active internal lives, with hyperresponsive neural activity that leads to certain characteristic forms of atypical mental functioning.30 Whatever the case, it is important for literary scholars (particularly those with less familiarity with neurodiversity) to recognize that many neurodiversity researchers have serious skepticism about ToM deficit approaches to neurodivergence, despite the fact that the theory underpinned some earlier work in cognitive literary studies (as we will see more of in Chapter 3). Fortunately, some cognitive literary theorists have now adopted a more current outlook, and have moved away from their earlier scholarship linking autism to mindblindness—but the general cultural presence of this theory in the last four decades means that those new to neurodiversity studies must be especially careful when they encounter it.

The Aims and Scope of This Book So that, at least, is how my particular neurodivergent mind understands the basic concepts of neurodiversity, and is how I will generally approach them in what follows. But for you to understand the form this book takes, I think you need to know a little bit more about my intellectual background, so I’ll now resume the brief personal narrative that started this introduction. I am a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature; more specifically, I consider myself a literary and cultural historian of emotion, and the majority of my research (such as my books Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling, Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion, and The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature) tries to demonstrate how emotionality can be a productive theoretical lens for investigating early modern cultural formations.31 So, after I discovered that I am neurodivergent, I naturally began wondering 30 Kamila Markram and Henry Markram, “The Intense World Theory—A Unifying Theory of the Neurobiology of Autism,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 4 (2010): Article 224; Chunyan Meng et al., “Processing of Expressions by Individuals with Autistic Traits: Empathy Deficit or Sensory Hyper-Reactivity?,” PLOS ONE 16, no. 7 (2021): Article e0254207. 31 Bradley J. Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Bradley J. Irish, Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (London: Bloomsbury,

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about neurodiversity and neurodivergence in the English Renaissance, asking myself questions about how we might begin to search for, and then usefully talk about, forms of atypical neurological functioning in early modern England. I quickly discovered that, over the last decade or so, some scholars of Renaissance England had already been doing vital, groundbreaking research on this very topic, to the point that “early modern neurodiversity studies” was becoming something of its own subfield. I had found my people. I have always thought of myself as an “emotion guy,” so my turn to early modern neurodiversity studies initially felt like I was opening up a secondary avenue of research—a new field to play with, an expansion of my intellectual horizon. This is how I saw things at first. But, as I immersed myself in scholarship on early modern neurodiversity, I increasingly got the sense that this new area of study was intimately connected to my career-long interest in the workings of emotion—rather than being two separate things, emotion and neurodiversity were different ways of considering the same central sets of concerns. As will become apparent, the polemical purpose of the book you’re reading now is to make the case that neurodiversity is best understood as a constellation of related intellectual investments, and that literary neurodiversity studies can best assert its rightful place as a fundamental mode of critical analysis by actively and explicitly reconceptualizing its purview to reflect the shared conceptual terrain of these investments. As you will see, I believe that a neurological reading of a literary text should be seen as no less basic or self-evidently valuable as a reading that emphasizes (say) gender, sexuality, race, or class , and I attempt to envision one possible future for literary neurodiversity studies that may help realize that ultimate aim. But that is, once again, getting ahead of myself. Quite apart from my own recommendation for literary neurodiversity studies, the other (and in some ways, more important) goal of this book is to introduce readers to the central components of this developing field, so that they might become more familiar with the kinds of brilliant work being done on literary neurodiversity. To date, there has been no book-length attempt to account for literary neurodiversity studies, so this small volume is intended to offer a concise introduction to the concerns and methods of the field, an overview that might be quickly read to get one up to speed on this 2023); Bradley J. Irish, The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2025).

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vital area of literary research. As such, even if you wildly disagree with my vision for the future of literary neurodiversity studies, I hope that my attempt to take stock of existing research will prove useful, to scholars both already invested in neurodiversity and those encountering the field for the first time. Literary Neurodiversity Studies is composed of three main chapters. The first, “Literary Neurodiversity: The Present,” introduces the central investments and approaches of the field, with an extensive bibliographical review of how literary neurodiversity studies most basically works. The second chapter, “Literary Neurodiversity: A Future?” presents my argument about one possible future for literary neurodiversity studies: one that radically expands the field’s purview and what sort of work “counts” as neurodiversity studies. I make the case that this expansion can be accomplished in a responsible, ethical way that does not compromise the foundational commitments and values of the field, but that which might affirm the central importance of literary neurodiversity studies and help it rise to greater prominence. Finally, the last chapter, “Case Study: Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence in Othello,” provides a concrete example of literary neurodiversity studies at work, by modeling how sensitivity to neurodiversity and neurodivergence can help elucidate a widely familiar literary text. In my analysis, I not only perform a basic neurodiversity-informed reading of Othello, but also more specifically attempt to demonstrate the particular critical value that is to be found in the reconceptualization of neurodiversity that I present in Chapter 3. After a brief conclusion, the book ends with a (robust, though non-exhaustive) bibliography of existing scholarship on literature and neurodiversity. Literary Neurodiversity Studies is a very short book, so it will inevitably be incomplete; it is my hope that it is simply the start of a conversation. As the field grows, what’s presented here will certainly be superseded by more thorough and up-to-date accounts of what it means to do literary neurodiversity studies—but for the meantime, I hope it can serve as a rallying cry for those already invested in the topic of literary neurodiversity, and an invitation for those who’d like to become so. And one final thing. If you’re coming to this book because you’re neurodivergent, or think that you may be neurodivergent, know that I see you. I hope that you like what you will find here, and that whether you’re a reader, student, teacher, or scholar of literature, you will leave knowing a little bit more about how our way of being in the world shapes how

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books are written, books are read, and books are interpreted. Though still a new field, literary neurodiversity studies is both a thrilling and joyous space to inhabit, and I suspect that you’ll come to find it as rewarding and validating as I do.

CHAPTER 2

Literary Neurodiversity: The Present

Abstract This chapter offers a survey of existing research in literary neurodiversity studies, outlining the key works and scholarly approaches. It tends to the analysis of neurodivergent characters and authors, neurodivergent style, neurodivergent modes of reading and interpretation, and the intersectional relationship of neurodiversity to other aspects of personal identity, among other things. Keywords Literary neurodiversity studies · Neuroqueer · neurodivergence in literature

Although there had been occasional consideration of neurodiversity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary criticism, in the last decade or so the field of literary neurodiversity studies has begun to explicitly take shape. The goal of this chapter is to present a broad overview of research on the topic of literature and neurodiversity, to give you a sense of how literary neurodiversity studies works as an area of inquiry. I will focus on the characteristic critical approaches and concerns of the field, with the hope of offering a thumbnail sketch of what it means to think about literature through the lens of neurodiversity. Given the newness of literary neurodiversity studies, there has not yet been much effort to account for its general features; the most thorough © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 B. J. Irish, Literary Neurodiversity Studies, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2_2

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overview is Mardy Philippian’s outstanding article on “Neurodiversity and Literature” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.1 But it’s still possible to make some broad observations about how the field has taken shape, and how it currently stands in 2025. Put simply, literary neurodiversity studies uses the lens of human neurological diversity to consider how literature works, how it is created, and how it is interpreted. Consistent with the broader practices of neurodiversity studies, the field thus far has almost exclusively focused on prioritizing neurodivergence: the emphasis is on how a sensitivity to less common, atypical forms of cognitive, emotional, and sensory processing can inform our study of literature and literary meaning. In approaching neurodivergence, some general methodological patterns have already emerged, so we can point to a few characteristic ways that literary neurodiversity studies tends to routinely approach literary analysis. It is probably fair to say that the foundation of literary neurodiversity studies concerns matters of representation: the most typical (as well as earliest) scholarship in the field involves analyzing fictional works that contain characters who may, for whatever reason, be understood as neurodivergent or potentially neurodivergent. This is most easily accomplished in the study of (relatively) contemporary literature, where characters are more likely to explicitly identify (or be explicitly identified) as neurodivergent—as, for example, with figures in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark (2002), Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Clare Morrall’s The Language of Others (2008), Sabina Berman’s Me, Who Dove into the Heart of World (2012), or Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014).2 In 2010, Ian Hacking noted 1 Mardy Philippian, “Neurodiversity and Literature,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Sonya Freeman Loftis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 2 See Stephen Dougherty, “Autism and Modular Minds in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark,” Mosaic 43, no. 4 (2010): 35–50; Christy Tidwell, “‘Everything Is Always Changing’: Autism, Normalcy, and Progress in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark and Nancy Fulda’s ‘Movement,’” in Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, ed. Kathryn Allan (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 153–68; Elena Semino, “Language, Mind and Autism in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” in Linguistics and Literary Studies: Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers, ed. Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 279–304; Elena Semino, “Pragmatic Failure, Mind Style, and Characterisation in Fiction About Autism,” Language and Literature 23, no. 2 (2014): 141–58; Michelle Resene, “A ‘Curious Incident:’ Representations of Autism in Children’s Detective Fiction,” The Lion and the Unicorn 40, no. 1 (2016): 81–99; Stephan Freißmann, “A Tale of Autistic Experience:

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that there “are literally hundreds of works” of autism fiction, and the number has only grown since then—so it make sense that literary scholars interested in neurodiversity have paid particular attention to such explicit representations of neurodivergence.3 This work often considers how neurodivergence is portrayed at the level of characterization and verbal expression, as well as how the presentation of openly neurodivergent

Knowing, Living, Telling in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6, no. 2 (2008): 395–417; Monica Orlando, “Neurodiverse Self-Discovery and Social Acceptance in Curious Incident and Marcelo in the Real World,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 12, no. 3 (2018): 321–35; Joseph Valente, “This Disability Which Is Not One: Autistic Intermittency in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Contemporary Literature 62, no. 1 (2021): 35–66; Soohyun Cho, “Rethinking Genre Conventions: Exploring Detective Formulas and Autistic Stereotypes in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 38, no. 2 (2020): 90–99; Janko Andrijaseviæ, “Literature and Medicine: Asperger Syndrome in Mark Haddon’s Novel ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,’” Armenian Folia Anglistika 5, no. 1–2 (2009): 226–32; James Berger, “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum,” in Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 2008), 271– 88; Shiqin Chen, “Autism, Representation and Culture in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Yonghong Hu’s My Running Shadow,” Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 49, no. 2 (2022): 789–800; Vivienne Muller, “Constituting Christopher: Disability Theory and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 16, no. 2 (2006): 118–25; Hana Saliba-Salman, “Parody or Pastiche in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Studies in Popular Culture 40, no. 2 (2018): 85–96; Susanne Rohr, “‘The Image Makers’: Reality Constitution and the Role of Autism in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World,” in Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works, ed. Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks, and Hubert Zapf (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 249–62; Marla Carlson, “Autism and Affect in Post-Realist Theatre,” in Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy and Philip Barnard (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 149–60; Sue Lovell, “‘I Am, (Therefore and with Difficulty) I Think’: An Enactive Reading of Sabina Berman’s Autistic Narrator,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63, no. 1 (2022): 82–95; Péter Kristóf Makai, “Autistic Consciousness Represented: Fictional Mental Functioning of a Different Kind,” in Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction, ed. Grzegorz Maziarczyk and Joanna Klara Teske (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 56–71; Stuart Murray, “Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (2006): 24–45. 3 Ian Hacking, “Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2010): 634. See also Péter Kristóf Makai, “The Paradox of Reading Autistic Fiction,” in Exchanges Between Literature and Science from the 1800s2000s: Converging Realms, ed. (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 188–204.

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figures invites us to explore larger social questions about disability in contemporary culture and beyond; Elena Semino, for example, demonstrates how such novels portray “the mind styles of autistic protagonists” in moments of difficult communication and social interaction, while Christy Tidwell has argued that autistic science fiction is a “promising but complicated site for explorations of disability,” given its portrayal of “contradictory models of progress alongside vivid representations of disability and descriptions of stereotypes about autism.”4 But besides these obvious cases, scholars have also examined potential neurodivergence in characters that are not explicitly coded as so—particularly characters from twentiethcentury literature, given that the modern psychological understanding of neurodivergence began to develop in that time. To this end, critics have examined the possibility of neurodivergence (particularly autism) in characters like Sherlock Holmes, Gaev in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Stevie in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Paul in Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Murphy in Beckett’s Murphy, Eva in Bowen’s Eva Trout, and Aureliano Babilonia in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.5

4 Semino, “Pragmatic Failure, Mind Style, and Characterisation,” 142; Tidwell, “‘Everything Is Always Changing,’” 167. 5 Sonya Freeman Loftis, “The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34.4 (2014): https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/ view/3728/3791; Joseph Valente, “The Accidental Autist: Neurosensory Disorder in The Secret Agent,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 1 (2014): 20–37; David V. Urban, “Gaev’s Asperger’s Syndrome in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: A Diagnosis and a Call for Character Reassessment,” Australian Slavonic & East European Studies 27, no. 1– 2 (2013): 35–60; Hayley Wilhelm, “Signs and Symptoms of Autism in Willa Cather’s PAUL’S CASE,” The Explicator 75, no. 3 (2017): 194–99; Lance Olsen, “Diagnosing Fantastic Autism: Kafka, Borges, Robbe-Grillet,” Modern Language Studies 16, no. 3 (1986): 35–43; Mark Decker, “I Was Trying to Say: Listening to the Fragmented Human Center of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Kaleidoscope 47 (2003): 6–9; Ato Quayson, “Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On Samuel Beckett’s Murphy,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2010): 838–64; Joseph Valente, “Murphy and the Tao of Autism,” in Beckett Beyond the Normal, ed. Seán Kennedy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 16–32; Valerie O’Brien, “‘A Genius for Unreality’: Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout,” Journal of Modern Literature 42, no. 2 (2019): 75–93; Juan Manuel Espinosa, “The Blur of Imagination: Asperger’s Syndrome and One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies, ed. Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 245–58.

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Indeed, the analysis of neurodivergent characters is at the heart of Sonya Freeman Loftis’s groundbreaking study Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum (2015), generally credited as the first book specifically devoted to literature and neurodiversity.6 (A vital precursor is Stuart Murray’s Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination [2008], which analyzes narratives about autism in many artistic contexts, including literature.)7 Loftis’s project explores “the interrelationship of literary representations of autism, cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and disability identity politics,” arguing that “the surprisingly frequent presence of autistic characters in popular literary works testifies to our culture’s interest in cognitive difference and to the disruptive power of disabled figures in normative discourse”—yet, in their reliance on and perpetuation of stereotypes about autism, “these literary depictions of life on the spectrum are left to stand as representative of what autism is,” and “such depictions remain unquestioned, unexplained, and unexplored” (2). Accordingly, Loftis reveals how literary creations help shape the public perception of autism, often by reinforcing harmful and misleading stereotypes of what it means to be autistic. Focusing on literature from the last 150 years, she argues that growing interest in the representation of autism reflects larger cultural and literary concerns—“autism can be seen as part of modernism’s interest in consciousness and fragmentation and postmodernism’s destabilizing repetitive aesthetic” (11)—and thus the topic naturally emerges from an era that saw the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and that continues today in the growing age of posthuman cyborgs and artificial intelligence. Put simply, modern and postmodern literary works “frequently use autism as a fluid signifier to represent various aspects of the neurotypical world that are considered outcast or alien” (16), and Loftis identifies how well-known literary works traffic in a number of characteristic stereotypes about autistic (or autistically coded) individuals. The book starts, for example, with the obviously neurodivergent Sherlock Holmes, tracing the development of the “autistic detective trope” to twenty-first-century

6 Sonya Freeman Loftis, Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 7 Stuart Murray, Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). See also Mark Osteen, ed., Autism and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2008).

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television shows like Criminal Minds and Bones; not only do such representations frequently portray the autistic character as an alien “other” to be puzzled over by their neurotypical colleagues, they also perpetuate the myth that neurodivergent people must display a savant-like genius to be worthwhile, and often even make the more troubling suggestion that autistic people have special insight into the minds of violent criminals. Loftis equally explores the genius/savant trope in the heroes of Bernard Shaw, whose characters Saint Joan and Henry Higgins are “social outcasts whose stories prioritize and celebrate eccentric individuality” (20), as well as creative genius.8 Other chapters explore (among other things) works in which autistic characters “appear to be locked within themselves, confined by a tragic interiority, unable to communicate”—such as “Boo” Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird, Laura from The Glass Menagerie, and Benjy from The Sound and the Fury—and works in which autistic characters are associated with “victimization, violence, and sexuality”—such as Lennie from Of Mice and Men and Charlie from Flowers for Algernon. The book concludes by treating a variety of twenty-first-century depictions of autistic stereotypes, from works such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The research I’ve addressed so far has focused on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary characters, corresponding to the time period in which neurodiversity began to be formally theorized—but literary scholars have also productively analyzed the potential neurodivergence of characters from more historically distant eras. In this way, scholars have discussed the neurodivergent possibilities of historical literary figures like de Troyes’s Perceval, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Bastard (of King John), Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, Austen’s Mr. Darcy and John Thorpe, Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Creature, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, and Melville’s Bartleby.9 8 See also Rodelle Weintraub, “Bernard Shaw’s Henry Higgins: A Classic Aspergen,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 49, no. 4 (2006): 388–97. 9 Paula Leverage, “Is Perceval Autistic? Theory of Mind in the Conte Del Graal,” in Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage et al. (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011), 133–52; Sonya Freeman Loftis and Lisa Ulevich, “Obsession/ Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2014), 58–75; Olivia Henderson, “‘Like a Dull Actor Now I Have Forgot My Part’: Coriolanus and Shakespearean Autism,” Shakespeare Studies 50 (2022): 126–52; Laura Seymour, “Shakespearean

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It is vital, however, to think very carefully about what it means to associate such characters with neurodivergence. In practice, doing so typically means linking them to some sort of modern label of neurological difference—and as mentioned in the Introduction, some scholars (such as Bérubé) are very skeptical of this approach.10 For one thing, we saw how such diagnostic labels are historically pathologizing, and employing them in literary analysis risks inadvertently boosting their coercive, normative power, and risks replicating in our work the harm that they do. Furthermore, the same objection that is sometimes levied against psychoanalytic approaches can apply here: fictional characters aren’t real, and have no genuine medical history that can be considered, so it is somewhat absurd to try to diagnose their neurological being via reference to some medical criteria in the real world. And further still, this problem becomes considerably amplified when analyzing literary characters of the past, as associating them with twentieth- and twenty-first-century medical labels can entail imposing on them a category of identity that they themselves would not understand, and that radically postdates their own lived experience—and besides, diagnostic criteria are themselves historically situated constructions, which routinely change across time! These are obviously issues that must be considered. When it comes to historical subjects, one way forward is to let such figures speak for themselves, and listen to how they understand their own neurological being. This is the productive path that Seymour takes in

Echolalia: Autism and Versification in King John,” Shakespeare 18, no. 3 (2022): 335– 51; Lavinia Horner, “Literary Articulations of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Mild Autism in Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood,” Women in French Studies 27, no. 1 (2019): 75–88; Mikhal Dekel, “Austen and Autism: Reading Brain, Emotion and Gender Differences in Pride and Prejudice,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 10, no. 3 (2014), http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue103/dekel.html; Julia Miele Rodas, “Autistic Voice and Literary Architecture in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in Disabling Romanticism, ed. Michael Bradshaw (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 169–90; Julia Miele Rodas, “‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre,” in The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jayne Eyre, Discourse, Disability, ed. David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 51–70; 169–90; Thelma Grove, “Barnaby Rudge: A Case Study in Autism,” Dickensian 83, no. 413 (1987): 139–48; Galia Benziman, “Talking Birds and Talking to Birds: Transcending the Child in Barnaby Rudge,” Dickens Studies Annual 52, no. 1 (2021): 1–29; Amit Pinchevski, “Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability,” Cultural Critique 78, no. 1 (2011): 27–59. 10 See Bérubé, Secret Life of Stories.

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her study of Hugh Blair of Borgue, an eccentric eighteenth-century Scottish nobleman.11 Though modern scholars have long associated Blair with autism, Seymour argues that “attempting to ‘diagnose’ him with autism using modern diagnostic criteria can replicate some of the harsh judgements that [his peers] made against him”: thus “rather than imposing a diagnosis on Hugh,” she suggests that “we allow him to shape us through performing the acts that made him distinctive.”12 As Seymour explains, the diagnostic impulse becomes unnecessary altogether: Hugh’s life and behaviours…might resonate with the experiences of neurodiverse people in the present day. In some significant ways, Hugh seems to have thought and behaved differently to his society’s norm in a way that— with no need for a formal diagnosis—we can call neurodivergent. I do not mean here that I am informally diagnosing Hugh. Instead, we can engage with him beyond diagnostic frameworks. Neurodivergent people can be aware that we think and behave differently from the “norm” without needing to consult lists of diagnostic criteria.

Seymour is “not opposed to diagnostic tools per se as instruments that can help identify conditions like autism,” but she more fundamentally shows how “diagnostic language describing autism hampers an attempt to appreciate the richness of Hugh’s life because it encourages us to view Hugh as less than the average”—it “occludes [the] ability to recognise and value Hugh’s life and abilities.” Thus Seymour demonstrates how we can understand Blair’s neurodivergence via his own way of being in the world—in this case, one that was fond of copying and imitation—and we can even recognize his full human agency by “empowering him to influence us”—that is, “performing actions that he performed, allowing them to shape our bodyminds, if only for a time.”

11 Laura Seymour, “Copying Not Diagnosing: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue,” Disability Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2024), https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/art icle/view/8811. There are no pages for this electronic article, so I don’t cite page numbers in the rest of this paragraph. See also Hilary N. Fezzey, “A Neurodiverse Perspective of the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue and Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 18, no. 1 (2024): 53–68. 12 See Rab Houston and Uta Frith, Autism in History: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue (c.1708-1765) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Seymour’s essay is inspired by the diagnostic impulse of this book.

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Seymour’s case study, of course, examines a biographical, non-fictional figure—but it still can quite obviously be applied to literary characters, and provides an extremely promising, non-diagnostic way to think about neurodiversity in the historical past. Another option, which can be used in conjunction with Seymour’s approach, is to refashion how we understand diagnostic labels, and liberate them from the harmful and pathologizing medical context from which they arose. It seems clear that neurodivergent people have always existed, quite independently of the twentieth-century medical framework that came to label and diagnose neurological difference, and there have always been literary depictions of individuals whose cognitive, emotional, and sensory functioning diverges from the presumed norm of their cultural context. Historical disability scholars like Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood have thus argued that modern conceptualizations of disability can usefully inform our investigation of the literary and historical past—both by alerting us to historically situated forms of disability and by revealing points of contact and continuity between historical and contemporary constructions of disability and able-bodiedness—and researchers working on neurodiversity in historical literature have also followed suit.13 In an important early article of literary neurodiversity studies, Renaissance scholars Loftis and Lisa Ulevich argue that “while it seems doubtful that any of Shakespeare’s characters meet the modern diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder, this does not mean that none of Shakespeare’s characters possess autistic traits”—so rather than vulgarly “diagnosing” characters from the past, researchers of literary neurodiversity instead point to how depictions of historical figures may anticipate or resonate with modern understandings of neurodivergence.14 While I absolutely agree that we should honor and prioritize how historical characters understand and perform their own neurological being, I also am not as bothered as some scholars by using modern diagnostic labels to consider past subject—provided, of course, that those

13 Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Ethical Staring: Disabling the Renaissance,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 1–22; David Houston Wood, “Staging Disability in Renaissance Drama,” in A New Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 487–500. 14 Loftis and Ulevich, “Obsession/Rationality/Agency,” 58–59.

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diagnostic labels are properly reconceptualized and depathologized. (As an autistic person, I actually find it quite validating and empowering to think that there has been an eternal historical legacy of people whose neurological functioning was somewhat similar to mine, even if they didn’t have the label autistic to understand themselves.) One way that I (working also with Melinda Marks) tried to reconceptualize diagnostic labels is by developing the concept of neurotype—an idea used occasionally and somewhat casually in neurodiversity studies, but which has not been subject to much explicit theorization.15 Put simply, a neurotype is a form of neurological style; so for example, one might speak of the autism neurotype, or the ADHD neurotype, or even more broadly of a neurotypical neurotype or neurodivergent neurotype. (And it doesn’t just have to refer to matters of specific neurodivergence: we might refer to someone having an introverted neurotype or a risk-taking neurotype.) Every individual’s unique neurological functioning is probably composed of countless neurotypes interacting with one another, evident to different degrees at different times.16 So, practically speaking, neurotypes are often designated via familiar labels from a modern medical framework. But there’s a world of difference when it comes to implications. While diagnostic labels impose a supposedly natural, biologically-determined, essentialist identity on a person’s neurological being, neurotypes can instead simply be understood as conceptual, socially determined, non-essentialist labels that simply account for the fact that certain kinds of roughly analogous neurological functioning styles sometimes cluster together in ways that can be usefully designated by a particular label, for the purposes of a particular intellectual task. In other words, there is no natural, underlying biological “essence” that unites every instance of the (say) autism neurotype, and different instances of the autism neurotype may look wildly different,

15 Bradley J. Irish, “Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies: A Preliminary Research Agenda.” Keynote Talk given at “Body Matters! Disability in English Literature to 1800” (Santa Barbara: University of California, March 2024), https://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ 2023-2024-events/; Melinda Marks and Bradley J. Irish, “Shakespeare, Neurological Identity, and Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies: A Neurological Approach to ‘Character,’” Shakespeare (2024): https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2024.2444937. 16 For one of the most elaborate discussions of neurotypes, see Kelli Murgado-Willard, Neurodiverse Couple Therapy: A Practical Guide to Brain-Informed Care (New York: Routledge, 2024).

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reflecting the fact that human neurodiversity is (as I have said) limitless.17 (Indeed, as Sara Ryan and Milton put it, autism is “brilliantly and impossibly diverse in terms of experiences, characteristics, ‘symptoms,’ possible biological markers, and social contexts.”)18 The point is just that talking about different members of the category autism under a singular conceptual umbrella might sometimes serve a researcher’s goals and aims in some precise intellectual, experimental, or rhetorical context. Walker, who has some skepticism about the concept of neurotypes, importantly cautions against adopting a reductive neuroessentialist framework that reduces the concept of neurodiversity to cataloging rigid “types” of minds—but that is why in my theorization, neurotypes are radically non-essentialist, and are simply intellectual tools for thinking about categories of neurological similarity and difference in a non-pathologizing, non-diagnostic way.19 The non-essentialist quality of neurotypes, I think, can make them a very valuable way to discuss literary and biographical figures of the past, because it allows us to talk about general resemblances between historical instances of neurological functioning and modern conceptualizations— rather than diagnosing a medieval subject “with autism,” we can instead more responsibly (and non-anachronistically) tentatively align their traits and characteristics with the autism neurotype—or, a particular autism neurotype—as that neurotype is understood by the modern researcher, to see if that helps us understand their neurological being a little bit better. (Edward Mills, in fact, has recently discussed how we might use the designation autism-like to refer to neurological styles from the past, in a way similar to how scholars interrogate queerness in historical periods that predate more modern conceptualizations of sexuality.20 ) Returning to Seymour’s approach, neurotypological thinking also importantly allows researchers to interrogate historically situated neurotypes: that is, particular conceptualizations of neurological style that existed in a particular chronological period, but that do not endure to the present day. In my area of early modern studies, for example, we might examine how 17 See Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 172–173. 18 Sara Ryan and Damian Milton, “Critical Autism Studies: An Introduction,” in Milton

and Ryan, Handbook of Critical Autism Studies, 1. 19 For Walker’s caution, see Neuroqueer Heresies, 172–173. 20 Edward Mills, “‘Autism-like’? Neurodivergence and the Pre-Modern World,” in

Towards an Accessible Academy: Perspectives from Disabled Medievalists, ed. Alex R.A. Lee and Hope Doherty-Harrison (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming).

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contemporaries understood there to be a cluster of cognitive, emotional, and sensory properties associated with particular character types, such as the fool, the melancholic, or the malcontent. I realize that some scholars may not be convinced by this idea—it is certainly true that retaining linguistic designations from the modern medical context might risk inadvertently validating the very diagnostic impulse that the concept of neurotypes is designed to supplant. But I believe that if we are explicit and purposeful in articulating a critical distance from pathologizing diagnosis, then the convenience, flexibility, and analytic possibilities of neurotypological thinking make it an approach worth exploring. As with all things in neurodiversity studies, individual researchers will find themselves variously drawn to different methods, especially as new techniques and theorizations continue to develop. So while more theoretical and methodological work needs to be done in this area, it seems that there indeed are intellectually justifiable, non-diagnostic ways to speak about neurodivergence in literary characters of the historical past, even though their creation predates modern conceptualizations of neurodiversity—both by reconceptualizing how we understand diagnostic labels, and by eschewing labels altogether. Whether historical or modern, the analysis of neurodivergent and potentially neurodivergent characters has been the cornerstone of literary neurodiversity studies, and it will undoubtedly continue to flourish as a research approach as the field continues to develop. Beyond character, literary neurodiversity studies also considers the neurodivergence (or possible neurodivergence) of particular authors. This work is two-tiered, analogous to what we saw above about the study of literary characters. First, scholars analyze contemporary writers who explicitly identify themselves as neurodivergent, such as those (in the context of autism) working in the growing genre that is playfully called autie-biography.21 In the final decades of the last century, 21 Murray, Representing Autism; Ian Hacking, “Autistic Autobiography,” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1522 (2009): 1467–73; Priscilla Paton, “Temple Grandin and the Neuroscience of Empathy,” JAC 33, no. 1–2 (2013): 352–63; Leni Van Goidsenhoven, “‘Autie-Biographies’: Life Writing Genres and Strategies from an Autistic Perspective,” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 64, no. 2 (2017): 79–95; Ajitpaul Mangat, “Embodied Consciousness: Autism, Life Writing and the Limits of the Cognitive Paradigm,” in Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction, ed. Grzegorz Maziarczyk and Joanna Klara Teske (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 72–88; Tova Cooper, “Orbiting the Neurotypical Universe: Aspergian Narratives by Lydia Netzer and John

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neurodivergent authors started publishing accounts of their lives—such as David Eastham’s Understand: Fifty Memowriter Poems (1985), David Miedzianik’s My Autobiography (1986), Temple Grandin’s Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986), Judy and Sean Barron’s There’s a Boy in Here (1992), Donna Williams’s Nobody, Nowhere (1992), and Thomas A. McKean’s Soon Will Come the Light (1994)—and the genre has become increasingly prominent in the last two decades, as evidenced by more recent works such as Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day (2007), Caiseal Mór’s A Blessing and a Curse (2007), Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay’s How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? (2008), Naoki Higashida’s Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 (2017), Anand Prahlad’s The Secret Life of a Black Aspie (2017), and Jennifer Cook O’ Toole’s Autism in Heels (2018).22 Given the political and ethical commitments of neurodiversity studies,

Elder Robinson,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 12, no. 4 (2018): 423–39; Monica Orlando, “Double Voicing and Personhood in Collaborative Life Writing About Autism: The Transformative Narrative of Carly’s Voice,” Journal of Medical Humanities 39, no. 2 (2018): 217–31; Joseph Valente, “All Better? Recovery Anxiety in the Writing of Autism,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 12, no. 4 (2018): 477–94; Mita Banerjee, “Towards A Science of the Self: Autism, Autobiography, and Animal Behavior in Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67, no. 1 (2019): 53–72; Debra L. Cumberland, “Crossing Over: Writing the Autistic Memoir,” in Osteen, Autism and Representation, 183–96; Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith, “Autistic Autobiographies and More-Than-Human Emotional Geographies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 5 (2009): 898– 916; Anne Fleche, “Echoing Autism: Performance, Performativity, and the Writing of Donna Williams,” TDR 41, no. 3 (1997): 107–21; Chris Foss, “Emerging from Emergence: Toward a Rethinking of the Recovery Story in Nine Contemporary Nonfiction Autism Narratives,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2009), https://dsq-sds.org/ index.php/dsq/article/view/924; Sidonie Smith, “Taking It to a Limit One More Time: Autobiography and Autism,” in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 226–46; Hannah Tweed, “Controversies of Care: Technology, Caregivers and ‘Autiebiography,’” in Discourses of Care: Media Practices and Cultures, ed. Amy Holdsworth, Karen Lury, and Hannah Tweed (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 112–30; Noah Adams, “Autistics Never Arrive: A Mixed Methods Content Analysis of Transgender and Autistic Autobiography,” Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2022): 145–61. 22 David W. Eastham, Fifty Memowriter Poems (Ottawa: Oliver Pate, 1985); David Miedzianik, My Autobiography (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, Child Development Research Unit, 1986); Temple Grandin and Margaret M. Scariano, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (Novato, CA: Arena Press, 1986); Judy Barron and Sean Barron, There’s a Boy in Here (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Donna Williams, Nobody, Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic (New York: Times Books, 1992); Thomas A. McKean, Soon Will Come the Light: A View from Inside the Autism Puzzle (Arlington:

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scholars agree about the importance of foregrounding neurodivergent voices; for example, Anna Stenning’s recent monograph Narrating the Many Autism: Identity, Agency, Mattering (2024) deftly centers narratives by people who identify as autistic to showcase “the autistic subject’s capacity for critical resistance and reconstruction” and imagine what it takes “for autistic people to participate in a shared world as equals with other people.”23 More specifically, there has been considerable analysis of the life writing of animal behavioralist Temple Grandin, who has been called “perhaps the world’s most famous autistic person.”24 Similarly, scholars treat literature that serves as a biography or semi-biography of explicitly neurodivergent people, such as Bef’s Maria Speaks: A Graphic Novel about Autism (2018), a graphic novel that depicts the life of the author’s autistic

Future Education, Inc., 1994); Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (New York: Free Press, 2007); Caiseal Mór, A Blessing and a Curse: Autism and Me (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2007); Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008); Naoki Higashida, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism (New York: Random House, 2017); Anand Prahlad, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2017); Jennifer Cook O’ Toole, Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2018). See Yergeau, Authoring Autism, 21. 23 Anna Stenning, Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (New York: Routledge, 2024), x; 1. 24 Mangat, “Embodied Consciousness: Autism,” 81; see Natalie Kruse, Temple Grandin

and the Mediation of Autism Debates at the Interface Between Life Writing and the Life Sciences (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2021); Cary Wolfe, “Learning from Temple Grandin, or, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject,” in Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics, ed. Alfred Kentigern Siewers (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 91–108; Katherine Lashley, “The Grand Memoir: Temple Grandin and Autism,” in American Creative Nonfiction, ed. Jay Ellis (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2015), 139–52; Katherine Lashley, “Displaying Autism: The Thinking and Images of Temple Grandin (2010),” in Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts, ed. Benjamin Fraser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 126–40; Katherine Lashley, “The Metaphor of the Cattle Chute in Temple Grandin’s Books,” in Disability and the Environment in American Literature: Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm, ed. Matthew J. C. Cella (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 113–28; Tasha Oren, “Autism in Translation: Temple Grandin as the Autistic Subject,” in Disability Media Studies, ed. Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick Hagood (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 222–44; Paton, “Temple Grandin and the Neuroscience of Empathy”; Banerjee, “Towards A Science of the Self.”

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daughter.25 But alongside these contemporary works, those interested in literary neurodiversity also explore the tentative possibility that historical authors may be usefully considered through the lens of neurodivergence; such analysis, for example, has been applied to people like William Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, George Bernard Shaw, and Virginia Woolf.26 As with fictional characters, the goal of such scholarship is not to impose an anachronistic diagnostic label on historical figures, but rather to explore what may be gained by thinking of their characteristic traits alongside contemporary terms like autism—a reflection again of the fact that neurodivergent people have always existed in the world, long before the modern conceptualization of neurodiversity. Here the concept of neurotype may also prove useful. The analysis of neurodivergent characters and neurodivergent authors has been a centerpiece of literary neurodiversity studies—particularly earlier work in the field. At the same time, however, scholars are also becoming more and more aware that our research on neurodiversity in literature can’t only settle on matters of representation—particularly because, as we saw, literary representations of neurodivergent people can sometimes do just as much harm as good.27 Accordingly, as literary neurodiversity studies grows, researchers are also investigating other ways

25 Bef, Habla María: Una Novela Gráfica Sobre El Autism (Barcelona: Editorial Océano, 2018); see Radmila Lale Stefkova, “Voiceless Bodies: Drawing Autism and Depression in Bef’s Maria Speaks,” in Graphic Embodiments: Perspectives on Health and Embodiment in Graphic Narratives, ed. Lisa DeTora and Jodi Cressman (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021), 163–72. On autism depicted in comic form, see also Chris Foss, “Reading in Pictures: Re-Visioning Autism and Literature through the Medium of Manga,” in Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, ed. Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 95–110. 26 See Leslie Brisman, “Wordsworth’s Autism,” La Questione Romantica 3, no. 2 (2011): 81–96; Stefano Calabrese and Maria Francesca Luziatelli, “Creativity and Autism Spectrum Conditions: A Hypothesis on Lewis Carroll,” Enthymema 17 (2017): 225–36; Sonya Freeman Loftis, “The Superman on the Spectrum: Shaw’s Autistic Characters and the Neurodiversity Movement,” SHAW 34 (2014): 59–74; Julie Brown, “Ice Puzzles of the Mind: Autism and the Writings of Hans Christian Andersen,” CEA Critic 69, no. 3 (2007): 44–64; Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism (London: Atlantic Books, 2021). 27 See Loftis, Imagining Autism; Kimberly Maich et al., “Pathology Persists and Stigma Stays: Representations of (Autistic) Stephen Greaves in the Post-Apocalyptic World,” Disability & Society 37, no. 6 (2022): 955–71.

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that neurodiversity theory can elucidate the concerns of literature, and this is forging new pathways for the field.28 One such approach entails investigating atypical forms of language and expression—what may be called neurodivergent style. It is wellknown that many (though not all) neurodivergent people engage in less common kinds of linguistic practices, so it makes sense that those interested in literary neurodiversity pay attention to how neurodivergence specifically manifests on the page. Obviously, this area of investigation can overlap with the study of neurodivergent characters and neurodivergent authors or historical subjects; Claire Barber-Stetson, for example, argues that certain stylistic traits in modernist writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hugh MacDiarmid anticipate those found in works by autistic authors, while Raymond McDaniel examines how the formal practice of experimental poet Kenneth Goldsmith “evokes the language and aura” of speakers on the autism spectrum.29 More elaborately, Julia Miele Rodas’s Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (2018) theorizes the “ways in which autism is expressed in language” from “a literary, semiotic, and cultural standpoint” (ix; 2).30 Rather than being “person-focused,” Rodas explains, Autistic Disturbances is about autistic voice, words and speaking, autistic text, autistic writing; structure, tone, inflection, and echoes; it is about iteration and pattern, invention and constructions of silence; it is about language that is unexpected, outspoken, rich, florid, nondialogic…In particular, this book recognizes echoes, tones, patterns, and confluences between autistic language, which is typically pathologized and devalued, and language used in culturally valued literary texts. (2)

28 Moving beyond representation is indeed is an explicit aim of Bergenmar, Creechan, and Stenning’s Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture. 29 Claire Barber-Stetson, “Slow Processing: A New Minor Literature by Autists and Modernists,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 1 (2014): 147–65; Raymond McDaniel, “Affect and Autism: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Reconstitution of Signal and Noise,” in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 368. 30 Julia Miele Rodas, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).

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As such, she traces the “startling, inventive, challenging, [and] irregular” features of autistic language, “from mutism to metaphor, from abstraction to repetition, syntax, word choice, logorrhea, monologuing, echolalia, inversion, precision, neologism, and formulaic use of words” (34). In articulating a poetics of autism, Rodas specifically elaborates “five groupings around which discourse about autistic language tends to focus”: ricochet (“the iterative ranges of autistic expression”); apostrophe (which “may be likened to broadcast and to prophecy”); ejaculation (“the tendency of autism to speak in bursts, eruptively”); discretion (“verbal collecting, ordering, and aligning; listmaking, cataloguing, and taxonomy”); and invention (“the joyful breaking down and retooling of conventional language in ways that defamiliarize and critique seemingly seamless and intuitive communicative practice”) (6–8). As it goes on, Autistic Disturbances demonstrates the complex ways that this poetics manifest across a range of literary texts, from Robinson Crusoe to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Though less explicitly about literature, neurodivergent style is also foregrounded in Yergeau’s important book Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (2018), a project about autism and rhetoric. Drawing heavily on queer studies—“we might,” Yergeau writes, “consider autism as a kind of neurologically queer motion,” in the sense that “to be autistic is to be neuroqueer” (18)—the book is premised on the fact that “autism is a profoundly rhetorical phenomenon [and] that autism is begging for rhetorical scrutiny” (7).31 Autistic people, it is well-known, often have an atypical relationship to language, but ableist logic often takes this to mean that “autism precludes the ability to both compose and enjoy stories,” and even “precludes [one] from being rhetorical, much less a rhetorician” (7; 5). This is an extremely damaging line of thought, given the long-standing commonplace that rhetoricity is a fundamental condition of humanity—and thus Yergeau interrogates “the ways in which non-rhetoricity denies autistic people not only agency but their very humanity” (11). Yergeau does this by developing the concept of demi-rhetoricity—that is, how neurotypical and clinical thinkers “craft the actually autistic as rhetorically residual subjects, as rhetors who are not quite rhetors” (32). Demi-rhetorical

31 Yergeau, Authoring Autism. The concept of neuroqueer is laid out most explicitly in Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies; see below.

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speech is often discounted and dismissed as a communicative failure— something that robs autistic people of their agency and personhood—but Yergeau argues that neurodivergent rhetors can also productively queer demi-rhetoricity, by “queering what rhetoric is and can mean, by in/ voluntarily middling and absenting themselves from rhetoric’s canons” (178). Accordingly, Authoring Autism concludes by considering autistic rhetoric in terms of invention, by positing the communicative power (and thus recuperating the rhetoricity) of “autistic figurations of vocalizations, stims, and complex body movements.” In the final analysis, then, we discover how “demi-rhetoricity holds potential as a reclamatory strategy for those who publicly disclose an autistic identity,” as a neuroqueer approach to rhetoricity helps empower and validate traditionally marginalized modes of neurodivergent communication (182). Tending to neurodivergent characters, tending to neurodivergent authors, and tending to neurodivergent style are the three methodological moves that are at the center of literary neurodiversity studies today. Much scholarship in the developing field takes one of these approaches, and the intellectual value of this work is becoming increasingly apparent—but this does not, of course, mean that this is the only way that researchers consider literature and neurodivergence. There is, for example, specific attention to how neurodivergence manifests in particular genres and media forms, such as comic books, science fiction, and young adult literature.32 There is also a growing interest in how neurodivergent readers, audiences, and practitioners engage with literature; Elizabeth Tomlinson 32 José Alaniz, “‘Mechanical Boys’: Omega the Unknown on the Spectrum,” in Uncanny

Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 35–58; Sarah Birge, “No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010), https://dsq-sds. org/index.php/dsq/article/view/1067/1255; Elizabeth Nijdam, “‘Thinking in Comics’: Representing Autism Spectrum Disorder in Autobiographical Graphic Narrative,” in The Health Humanities in German Studies, ed. Stephanie M. Hilger (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 125–36; Ryan J. Morrison, “Ethical Depictions of Neurodivergence in SF About AI,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 27, no. 3 (2019): 387–410; Clay Morton, “Thinking Outside the Empathy Box: The Autism Spectrum in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And Blade Runner,” Storytelling: A Critical Journal of Popular Narrative 15 (2015): 27–40; Robin Anne Reid, “‘I Came for the ‘Pew-Pew Space Battles’; I Stayed for the Autism’: Martha Wells’s Murderbot,” in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction, ed. Lisa Yaszek et al. (New York: Routledge, 2023), 95–101; Danielle Brownsberger, “Curious Students in the Composition Classroom: The Impact of Neurology Ideology in Young Adult Literature,” in Young Adult Literature in the Composition Classroom: Essays on Practical Applications, ed. Tamara Girardi

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and Sara Newman show how the writing techniques of autistic individuals can shed light on composition pedagogy, while Savarese discusses how autistic readers can teach us about poetry.33 Many scholars, for example, have investigated how neurodivergent individuals engage with Shakespeare, particularly in performance.34 and Abigail G. Scheg (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Publishing, 2018), 204– 20; Jeanne Dutton and Jennifer Miller, “A Little Piece of Evan: Adolescent Literature and the Autism Spectrum,” in Lessons in Disability: Essays on Teaching with Young Adult Literature, ed. Jacob Stratman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Publishing, 2015), 32–52; Mahboubeh Farhangi, Laleh Atashi, and Farideh Pourgiv, “Posthumanist Strategies of Forming Surrogate Cyborg Subjectivity in Contemporary Young Adult Autism Novels,” Critical Literary Studies 4, no. 2 (2022): 21–36; Chloë Hughes, “The ‘Words Inside’: ‘Disabled’ Voices in Contemporary Literature for Young People,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 2 (2017): 187–203; Mark Letcher, “Off the Shelves: Autism in Young Adult Literature,” English Journal 100, no. 2 (2010): 113– 16; Jason Michael Abad, “The Paratextual Labeling of Autistic-Authored YA Fiction as #OwnVoices: How YA Literary Culture Creates Space for Neurodivergent Authorship,” Disability Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2021), https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/art icle/view/7050/5945. 33 Elizabeth Tomlinson and Sara Newman, “Valuing Writers from a Neurodiversity Perspective: Integrating New Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder into Composition Pedagogy,” Composition Studies 45, no. 2 (2017): 91–112; Ralph James Savarese, “What Some Autistics Can Teach Us About Poetry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 394–417. See also Anthony Massa, Danielle DeNigris, and Kristen Gillespie-Lynch, “Theatre as a Tool to Reduce Autism Stigma? Evaluating ‘Beyond Spectrums,’” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 25, no. 4 (2020): 613–30; Cathryn Molloy, “Creating Co-Curricular Activist Writing Projects for Students in Writing Programs: The Case of the Neurodiversity Celebration Collaborative (NCC),” Composition Studies 50, no. 2 (2022): 205–10; Theresa Tinkle, “Getting Past a Crisis Mentality: Notes toward an Education in Neurodiversity,” Pedagogy 23, no. 3 (2023): 423–33; Shannon Walters, “Toward a Critical ASD Pedagogy of Insight: Teaching, Researching, and Valuing the Social Literacies of Neurodiverse Students,” Research in the Teaching of English 49, no. 4 (2015): 340–60; Matthew K. Belmonte, “Human, But More So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us About the Process of Narrative,” in Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 2008), 166–79; Riki Entz, “Developmentally, Cognitively, and Intellectually Disabled People Are Artists, Not Pet Projects,” Canadian Theatre Review 190 (2022): 32–34; Ben Fletcher-Watson and Shaun May, “Enhancing Relaxed Performance: Evaluating the Autism Arts Festival,” Research in Drama Education 23, no. 3 (2018): 406–20. 34 Sonya Freeman Loftis, Shakespeare and Disability Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Robert Shaughnessy, “As If,” Shakespeare Bulletin 36, no. 1 (2018): 37– 48; Robert Shaughnessy, “Give Me Your Hands,” Shakespeare Studies 47 (2019): 71–80; Robert Shaughnessy, “Shakespeare, Performance and Neurodiversity: Bottom’s Dream,” in Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy, ed. Jenny Stevens and Pamela Bickley (New

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As I mentioned in the introduction, a person’s neurological being is intimately tied to the other ways in which they inhabit the world. So speaking of identity, in literary studies there is also growing intersectional analysis of how neurodiversity and neurodivergence are enmeshed with other categories of social being. In my discussion of Yergeau’s Authoring Autism, I briefly touched on the idea of “neuroqueer”—but what I didn’t say then is that neuroqueer theory is also an enormously important and growingly influential approach to the study of neurodiversity, in literature and beyond. Though the term was first used by Walker in 2008, in 2014 a group of neurodivergent thinkers began developing the concept of neuroqueer in blogs and activist spaces, and their work gained further scholarly attention with the publication of Yergeau’s book and Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies (2021); whether you want to call neuroqueer theory a branch, area, or subfield of neurodiversity studies, it has in the last decade certainly become one of the most popular specific scholarly approaches to neurodivergence.35 Appropriately enough, neuroqueer is to be understood in terms of flexibility, subversion, and play, rather than rigid or formulaic definitions—but a good starting point is Walker’s original sense that “neuroqueering [is] the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and hereonormativity simultaneously,” in light of “how socially-imposed neuronormativity and socially-imposed heteronormativity [are] entwined with one another, and how the queering of either of those two forms of normativity is entwined with and blended into the queering of the other one.”36 (Quite

York: Routledge, 2023), 120–28; Kelly Hunter and Robert Shaughnessy, “Flute Theatre, Shakespeare and Autism,” in Reimagining Shakespeare Education: Teaching and Learning Through Collaboration, ed. Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen, and Jacqueline Manuel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 271–80; Seymour, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity; Laura Seymour, “‘Quintessence of Dust’: Centring Neurodivergence and Lived Experience of Suicidal Ideation in Readings of Hamlet,” in Shakespeare’s Madnesses, ed. Avi Mendelson and Leslie Dunn (New York: Palgrave, 2025) [forthcoming]. 35 Besides Yergeau and Walker’s books, for overviews of neuroqueer theory see Justine E. Egner, “‘The Disability Rights Community Was Never Mine’: Neuroqueer Disidentification,” Gender & Society 33, no. 1 (2019): 123–47; Jessica Penwell Barnett, “Neuroqueer Frontiers: Neurodiversity, Gender, and the (a)Social Self,” Sociology Compass 18, no. 6 (2024): article 13234. 36 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 160–161.

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crucially, Walker’s use of practice signals that neuroqueer was first envisioned as a verb, though it also became adopted by some people as an adjective indicating personal identity.) So the concept is most immediately connected to matters of gender and sexuality, and thus the first example Walker lists of neuroqueer practice is “being both neurodivergent and queer, with some degree of conscious awareness and/or active exploration around how these two aspects of one’s being entwine and interact.”37 But to neuroqueer can equally entail “approaching, embodying, and/or experiencing one’s neurodivergence as a form of queerness,” in a manner analogous to one of the many various ways that queerness is understood in queer theory, queer activism, or gender theory—so Merri Lisa Johnson, understanding queer as a “marker of atypicality” committed to depathologizing nonnormative ways of being, suggests that “neuroqueer could be defined as being unapologetically neurodivergent.”38 Indeed, Walker notes that things like “engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one’s own cultural conditioning” and “reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations” are neuroqueer practices, so anyone can neuroqueer and be neuroqueer; a “neuroqueer individual,” she writes, is “any individual whose identity, selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some ways been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering, regardless of what gender, sexual orientation, or style of neurocognitive functioning they may have been born with.”39 Thus for Yergeau, to be “neurologically queer” entails imagining an “inherently relational” possible future, which “defies, reclaims, and embraces the expansiveness that [neurodiversity] can potentially embody.”40 The neuroqueer perspective has been fruitfully utilized in a variety of academic contexts, such as feminist theory, film studies, communication theory, and educational studies—but it is also becoming a central

37 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 161. 38 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 162; Merri Lisa Johnson, “Neuroqueer Feminism:

Turning with Tenderness Toward Borderline Personality Disorder,” Signs 46, no. 3 (2021): 641. Johnson draws on Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no 3. (2007): 459-68; see p. 461 for “non-normative ways of living.” 39 Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, 162; 161. 40 Yergeau, Authoring Autism, 18; 19.

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way to engage literature and neurodiversity.41 Speaking of education, Monica Kleekamp and J. Logan Smilges develop the concept of neuroqueer literacies to reflect the diversity of ways that individuals can engage with reading, writing, and social communication.42 But the neuroqueer approach also generates interpretive readings of literary texts, as well as new interpretive practices. So Sari Altschuler, for example, deploys a “neuroqueer reading” of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond, or the Secret Witness to suggest that early American “republicanism was structured by a presumption of neurotypicality or, at the very least, by a belief that bodyminds were more or less versions of the same form.”43 Jennifer Blair examines how Eastham’s groundbreaking 1985 poetry collection Understand: Fifty Memowriter Poems “neuroqueers linguistic expression and the social conventions, particularly around attachment, that attend it.”44 Christopher Griffin argues that Rivers Solomon’s speculative novel An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) “stages a neuroqueer disidentification with storytelling, implicating discursive norms in

41 Sara M. Acevedo, “Lifelines: A Neuroqueer Politics of Non-Arrival in an Undergraduate Disability Studies Classroom,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2021): 1–15; Robin Roscigno, “Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice: Reading Against the Grain of Applied Behavioral Analysis Scholarship,” Educational Studies 55, no. 4 (2019): 405–19; Michelle Attias, “Exploring the Implications of Melanie Yergeau’s Neuroqueer for Art Education,” Visual Arts Research 46, no. 1 (2020): 78–91; David Ben Shannon, “Neuroqueer(Ing) Noise: Beyond ‘Mere Inclusion’ in a Neurodiverse Early Childhood Classroom,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 9, no. 5 (2020): 489– 514; Kristen L. Cole, “Neuroqueering Interpersonal Communication Theory: Listening to Autistic Object-Orientations,” Review of Communication 21, no. 3 (2021): 187–205; Johnson, “Neuroqueer Feminism”; David Hartley, “‘Is This to Be an Empathy Test?’: Autism and Neuroqueer Expression in Blade Runner (1982),” Science Fiction Film & Television 15, no. 2 (2022): 123–44. 42 Monica C. Kleekamp, “‘No! Turn the Pages!’ Repositioning Neuroqueer Literacies,” Journal of Literacy Research 52, no. 2 (2020): 113–35; J. Logan Smilges, “Neuroqueer Literacies; or, Against Able-Reading,” College Composition and Communication 73, no. 1 (2021): 103–25. 43 Sari Altschuler, “Neuroqueering the Republic: The Case of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” in American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828, ed. William Huntting Howell and Greta LaFleur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 311. 44 Jennifer Blair, “Understanding David Eastham’s Neuroqueerness,” Studies in Canadian Literature 46, no. 1 (2022): 234.

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the maintenance of violent intersections of oppression.”45 Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Anna Nygren, and Sarinah O’Donoghue read Madeleine Ryan’s 2020 novel A Room Called Earth as a “neuroqueer novel”—the book is “not only written by a neurodivergent author, but [is] written in a ‘neuroqueer’ way and with a neurodivergent audience in mind”—and use their analysis to “explore and theorise a neuroqueer reading practice.”46 And “draw[ing] on the life writing of autistic, trans, and autistic-trans authors,” Jake Pyne more generally takes a neuroqueer approach to suggest that “autistic and transgender experiences have significant and overlapping temporal schemes to which narrative is crucial.”47 As literary studies continues to explore neurodiversity, it will undoubtedly continue to deploy (and develop) neuroqueer theory—with good reason, as the framework has already proven remarkably productive, and also promises much more. There is also a body of work that considers the neurological dimensions of race in literature—a crucial intervention, given that neurodivergent people of color must contend with the compounded, violent impact of racism and neuronormative ableism.48 Stephen Knadler, for instance, explores “the compulsory neurotypicality of racial uplift politics” in the early twentieth-century writings of Pauline Hopkins, to show that the “history of Black neurodiversity [reveals how] antiblackness and cognitive

45 Christopher Griffin, “Relationalities of Refusal: Neuroqueer Disidentification and Post-Normative Approaches to Narrative Recognition,” South Atlantic Review 18, no. 3 (2022): 90. 46 Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Anna Nygren, and Sarinah O’Donoghue, “Title: Earthlove—Theorising Neurodivergent Reader Love of A Room Called Earth,” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 70, no. 1 (2023): 26; 25. This idea is developed further in Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Anna Nygren, and Sarinah O’Donoghue, “Moving Through a Textual Space Autistically,” Journal of Medical Humanities 45, no. 1 (2024): 17–34. 47 Jake Pyne, “Autistic Disruptions, Trans Temporalities,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 343. 48 People of color are drastically underdiagnosed with neurodivergence, and thus are often unable to receive the support they need (especially in early life and educational contexts). Furthermore, neurodivergent people of color are particularly subjected to violence. See, for example, Amber Davis, Marjorie Solomon, and Harolyn Belcher, “Examination of Race and Autism Intersectionality Among African American/Black Young Adults,” Autism in Adulthood 4, no. 4 (2022): 306–14, as well as Lydia X. Z. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, eds., All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (Lincoln: DragonBee Press, 2017).

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disability have often served as overlapping technologies in the formation of a white liberal humanism.”49 Susan Petit interrogates how the presence of autism in Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home demonstrates how the workings of disability can “represen[t] the action of white racism on many African Americans.”50 Shannon Walters considers how “the structural conditions of inequality involved with race and gender in the case of disabled family members” are depicted in Paul and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together, a graphic memoir in which a white male autistic child is cared for by a female African American domestic worker.51 Kristina Chew develops a reading of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Father of the Four Passages (2001) into a “critique of standard, white, middle-class narratives of autism, which dominate the literature and which perpetuate troubling stereotypes.”52 And Pilar Martínez Benedí suggests that Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist “links racial and cognitive diversity so as to interrogate exclusivist notions of identity.”53 Scholarship also considers neurodiversity and postcoloniality: Savarese engages the writings of Mukhopadhyay to argue “the need for a postcolonial neurology,” while Cindy LaCom shows how an autistic character in Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day reveals the ways that postcolonial subjects can be “doubly colonized” by intellectual disability.54 And beyond such work, there is also research that demonstrates how a neurodiversity and neurodivergence perspective can inform many other traditional interests of literary

49 Stephen Knadler, “Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations: Pauline Hopkins’s Counterintelligence,” American Literature 94, no. 2 (2022): 301. 50 Susan Petit, “Living in Different Universes: Autism and Race in Robinson’s Gilead and Home,” Mosaic 46, no. 2 (2013): 39 51 Shannon Walters, “Crip Mammy: Complicating Race, Gender, and Care in The Ride

Together,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 4 (2017): 478. 52 Kristina Chew, “The Disabled Speech of Asian Americans: Silence and Autism in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Father of the Four Passages,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010), https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v30i1.1068. 53 Pilar Martínez Benedí, “Where Racial Meets Neuro Diversity: Pondering ‘Who’s We’ in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60, no. 2 (2019): 179. 54 Ralph James Savarese, “Toward a Postcolonial Neurology: Autism, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and a New Geo-Poetics of the Body,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 3 (2010): 273; Cindy LaCom, “Revising the Subject: Disability as ‘Third Dimension’ in Clear Light of Day and You Have Come Back,” NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 138.

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studies, ranging from animal studies to environmental studies to book history.55 Finally, this has been implied in many of the more particular points I’ve covered in this chapter, but it should be generally recognized that scholars of literary neurodiversity—particularly neurodivergent scholars— are also becoming invested in neurodivergence as method—that is, what it might mean, in our scholarly work, to read neurodivergently, write neurodivergently, and interpret neurodivergently. (Neurodivergence can thus function as a kind of cripistemology, or a disabled way of knowing.)56 In general, academia is an ableist, neuronormative environment, so to approach research and teaching neurodivergently means working to destabilize, denaturalize, and denormalize so many of the professional conventions and expectations that are too often simply taken as given in academic life. A neurodiversity outlook thus entails leveling hierarchies that enshrine one kind of scholarly method or one kind of analytic approach as more “valuable” or “meaningful” or “rigorous” than another—recognizing instead that just as scholarly bodyminds naturally vary, so too will the kinds of research that they naturally produce. Honoring neurological difference means honoring scholarly difference, and acknowledging that ableist (and neuronormative) standards are fundamentally embedded in every metric of professional evaluation, shaping everything from who gets jobs to who publishes what to who gets lucrative grants and awards. Achieving a neurologically just profession is 55 Graham L. Bishop, “Spectral Animals: Deligny’s Autistic Vision and the Presence of the Immortal (Non)Human,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 26, no. 2 (2022): 179–87; Jenny Bergenmar, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, and Ann-Sofie Lönngren, “Autism and the Question of the Human,” Literature and Medicine 33, no. 1 (2015): 202–21; David Herman, “Trans-Species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives About Autism,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. Anna Whitehead and Angela Woods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 463–80; Maryanne L. Leone, “Reframing Disability Through an Ecocritical Perspective in Sara Mesa’s Cara de Pan,” Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades/ Journal of Gender & Sexuality Studies 45, no. 1 (2019): 161–84; Geoff Rodoreda, “Climate Fiction and Disability: Enabled Futures in James Bradley’s Clade (2015),” Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature 36, no. 1 (2022): 94–106; Gillian Silverman, “Neurodiversity and the Revision of Book History,” PMLA 131, no. 2 (2016): 307–23. 56 See Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies: Introduction,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 127–47; Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies Now (More than Ever!),” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 18, no. 2 (2024): 115–34.

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contingent upon overturning the norms that delegitimize neurodivergent researchers and neurodivergent research, and scholars working in literary neurodiversity studies are taking deliberate steps to move in the direction of realizing such a “neuromixed academia.”57 As should be apparent, in the last ten years the study of neurodiversity has become entwined with some of the most pressing concerns of literary studies, in ways that are becoming more and more nuanced and theoretically sophisticated. This can especially be seen, for example, in the field’s most recently released monograph, Martínez Benedí and Savarese’s Herman Melville & Neurodiversity, Or Why Hunt Difference With Harpoons?: A Primitivist Phenomenology (2024)—a remarkable book that explosively showcases the interpretive and imaginative possibilities of literary neurodiversity studies.58 I won’t be able to do it justice in a brief summary, but Herman Melville & Neurodiversity considers Melville as a “neuroanthropologist” (3), using “contemporary medical and neuroscientific ideas to illuminate a number of Melville’s works that explicitly foreground matters of embodied cognition, often in a prescient manner and often involving neurological disability” (21). The authors thus consider characters like Ahab, Bartleby, and Billy Budd in terms of neurodiversity, using a non-diagnostic approach that resists rigid, pathologizing categorization, yet that nonetheless touches upon countless forms of neurological being—including (what is now known as) “tinnitus, Capgras syndrome, Fregoli syndrome, phantom limb syndrome, mirror-touch synesthesia, trauma, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, cognitive disability, and stuttering” (21). But quite crucially, Martínez Benedí and Savarese are explicitly not interested in simply cataloging Melville’s literary representation of neurological difference—instead, they more radically “aim to show how Melville’s engagement with what we now call neurodiversity allows us to reframe the way scientists and doctors talk about 57 Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., “Cutting Our Own Keys: New Possibilities of Neurodivergent Storying in Research,” Autism 27, no. 5 (2023): 1235; see also Bridget Livingstone et al., “Weighing In: Academic Writers on Neurodiversity,” International Journal of Disability and Social Justice 3, no. 3 (2023): 72–97. This is, for example, a guiding principle of an essay collection I’m co-editing; see Bridget M. Bartlett, Bradley J. Irish, and Laura Seymour, eds., Neurodiversity in Early Modern English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.) 58 Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese, Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?: A Primitivist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

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departures from a neurological norm” (3). In documenting Melville’s complex exploration of “the neural unconscious”—that is, “what is still too fluid and emergent to be parsed” (39)—the book thus uses “contemporary insights to open up his work in new ways and, in turn, use[s] his work to put necessary pressure on these insights,” crucially doing so “in the context of emergent appraisals of neurological difference before they crystallized into weapons of pathology and exclusion” (9). Herman Melville & Neurodiversity promises an extremely bright future for the field. Neurodiversity is becoming an increasingly common theoretical lens in literary studies today, and I hope this chapter has made apparent that literary neurodiversity studies deserves to be recognized as a booming area of scholarship that has already produced a robust amount of research. Literary neurodiversity studies, a field only about a decade old, will undoubtedly continue to evolve, adapt, and expand in the future, as more and more scholars become sensitive to matters of neurodiversity and neurodivergence.

CHAPTER 3

Literary Neurodiversity: A Future?

Abstract This chapter offers one possible future for literary neurodiversity studies. Because neurodiversity reflects the infinite variety of human cognitive, emotional, and sensory functioning, it argues that all analyses of literary cognition, literary emotion, and literary sensation can be understood as united by its neurological interest, and thus can all be seen under the umbrella of literary neurodiversity studies. The chapter describes how we might radically expand our understanding of literary neurodiversity, while still maintaining our ethical commitments to neurodivergent ways of being. Keywords Cognition · Emotion · Sensation · Neurological · Literary neurodiversity studies

My analysis in Chapter 2 attempted to outline the present state of literary neurodiversity studies, by offering a general overview of where the field currently stands. My analysis in this chapter will attempt to present one possible future for literary neurodiversity studies: one that, I believe, could greatly strengthen the visibility and prominence of the field in literary studies at large. My vision of literary neurodiversity studies, I fully acknowledge, entails a somewhat radical reimagination and expansion of the field’s purview—and for this reason, I know that some scholars of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 B. J. Irish, Literary Neurodiversity Studies, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2_3

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literary neurodiversity might respond to my proposal with skepticism, if not outright hostility. This is quite alright, of course, and my feelings will not be hurt if the field does not embrace the outlook and approach that I put forth. But I do want to make one thing explicitly clear now, which I also hope will be apparent as this chapter progresses: in imagining the future possibilities of literary neurodiversity studies, I have at all times prioritized treating the field with care, love, and respect. Ethical concerns have been paramount, and I only suggest a new direction for literary neurodiversity studies because I firmly believe that it can be undertaken without doing harm to the area’s intellectual and political identity, and without doing harm to scholars (especially neurodivergent scholars) working on the topic. If it turns out that the collective wisdom of the field decides that the potential costs of such a shift outweigh the potential benefits, then I (obviously) defer to my colleagues, who have so generously welcomed me into their intellectual home. But the field of literary neurodiversity studies is such that I feel safe to make a proposal, even if it is ultimately not well received—my only hope is that my ideas are viewed as they are intended, as a good-faith suggestion made by someone deeply invested in the future of our work together. In order to present my proposed future for literary neurodiversity studies, it is first necessary to temporarily bracket the specific idea of neurodiversity, as it is usually understood—or rather, it requires breaking down the idea of neurodiversity to its fundamental components. As I outlined in the Introduction, neurological functioning is comprised of many things, but it is most conveniently understood as a set of cognitive, emotional, and sensory processes—thus neurodiversity refers to the fact that human minds naturally vary in the ways that they think, feel, and sense. Matters of cognition, emotion, and sensation make up the general domain of literary neurodiversity studies, and this larger domain is what I’d like to focus on for the moment: because the development of literary neurodiversity studies in the last decade runs parallel to another, even longer critical tradition in twenty-first-century literary analysis, one represented by the various fields known as literary cognitive studies , literary emotion and affect studies , and literary sensory studies . Indeed, over the last two decades, scholars have devoted an enormous amount of critical attention to the literary consequences of how people think, feel, and sense, quite independently of any connection to matters of neurodiversity. Consider, for instance, scholarship on literature and cognition. In the introduction to her field-shaping Oxford Handbook of Cognitive

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Literary Studies (2015), Lisa Zunshine notes that the study of literature and cognition is a “dynamic [and] relational” interdisciplinary field that takes a “dialogic, decentralized” approach to thinking about how mental processes shape the workings of literature and literary meaning.1 In the last twenty years, cognitive literary studies has become a booming field, as suggested by the number of general guidebooks and theoretical frameworks that have been published.2 There have been cognitive treatments of many specific literary periods, with a particular focus on medieval and early modern studies.3 There are cognitive theories of genres, such as poetry, drama, fiction, comics, and children’s literature, with an enormous investment in the cognitive dynamics of narrative generally.4 Other studies focus on cognitive analysis of particular authors, like Thomas 1 Lisa Zunshine, “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. 2 Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Terence Cave, Live Artefacts: Literature in a Cognitive Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Jukka Mikkonen, Philosophy, Literature and Understanding: On Reading and Cognition (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 3 Stefan Schöberlein, Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Hannah Walser, Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022); Marzia Beltrami, Spatial Plots : Virtuality and the Embodied Mind in Baricco, Camilleri, and Calvino (York: Northern Universities Press, 2021); Torsa Ghosal, Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First Century Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021); Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud, eds., Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020); Marco Nievergelt, Medieval Allegory as Epistemology: Dream-Vision Poetry on Language, Cognition, and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Lianne Habinek, The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018); Donald Beecher, Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016); Caroline Bicks, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World: Rethinking Female Adolescence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Dori Coblentz, Fencing Form and Cognition on the Early Modern Stage: Artful Devices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 4 Eva Lilja, Rhythm in Modern Poetry: An Essay in Cognitive Versification Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); Karen Simecek, Philosophy of Lyric Voice: The Cognitive Value of Page and Performance Poetry (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); Clelia Falletti et al., eds., Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Ronda Blair et al., eds., Theatre, Performance, and Cognition: Languages, Bodies, and Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, ed. The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood (London:

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Hardy, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and especially Shakespeare.5 And more specifically, there is considerable interest in the literary implications of embodied cognition, the process by which psychological phenomena arise from the physical body interacting with its environment.6 The intersection of literature and emotion has generated equal (if not greater) interest among scholars. (As I noted in the Introduction, my career has been devoted to the study of emotion.) “The centrality of emotion to literature and literary experience,” writes Patrick Colm Hogan in the introduction to Literature and Emotion (2018), has “been recognized throughout literary history and across literary traditions”; indeed, he notes, the fact that literature inspires emotion is a “key function of literary experience, not an occasional and incidental accompaniment.”7 While there has always been a critical interest in the emotional effects of literature, there has been an enormous boom in scholarship on the topic in the last two decades, reflecting the interdisciplinary “affective turn” across the sciences and humanities. Whether in nineteenth-century America or seventeenth-century France, there is work on emotion in

Bloomsbury, 2020); Merja Polvinen, Self-Reflective Fiction and 4E Cognition: An Enactive Approach to Literary Artifice (New York: Routledge, 2022); Mike Borkent, Comics and Cognition: Toward a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Maria Nikolajeva, Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014); Hermann Blume, Christoph Leitgeb, and Michael Rössner, eds., Narrated Communities, Narrated Realities: Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Angus Fletcher, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023); Daniel Candel, Cognitive Narrative Thematics: A Book About What Books Are About (New York: Routledge, 2024). 5 Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014); Sylvain Belluc and Valérie Bénéjam, Cognitive Joyce (New York: Palgrave, 2018); Marco Bernini, Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models, and Exploratory Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and Cognition: Thinking Fast and Slow Through Character (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Michael Booth, Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending: Cognition, Creativity, Criticism (New York: Palgrave, 2017); Nicholas R. Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (New York: Palgrave, 2019). 6 Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble, Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (New York: Routledge, 2014); Peter Garratt, ed., The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2016); Guillemette Bolens, Kinesic Humor: Literature, Embodied Cognition, and the Dynamics of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 7 Patrick Colm Hogan, Literature and Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1.

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virtually every period of literary history, with special concentration on medieval, early modern, and Romantic literature.8 Scholars analyze how emotion intersects with other areas of literary concern, such as gender, race, colonialism, and the environment.9 There are volumes dedicated to the workings of emotion in individual authors, with particular attention on Shakespeare.10 There is also work on the literary operation of particular emotions, ranging from happiness to shame to disgust.11 Finally, all of this is to say nothing about literary studies more explicitly anchored in Affect Theory, which obviously touches on emotion in many vital ways.12

8 Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Anna Rosensweig, Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022); Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Benedict S. Robinson, Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Kate Singer, Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019); Jacob Risinger, Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 9 Kaye Mitchell, Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Lisa M. Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020); Tanya Agathocleous, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, eds., Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). 10 Steven Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Paul Michael Johnson, Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Katharine A. Craik, ed., Shakespeare and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); R.S. White, Mark Houlahan, and Katrina O’Loughlin, eds., Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies (New York: Palgrave, 2015). 11 Badia Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021); Stephen Bishop, Scripting Shame in African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021); Zachary Samalin, The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021). 12 Stephen Ahern, ed., Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text (New York: Palgrave, 2019); Alex Houen, Affect and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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And as with cognition and emotion, in recent years there has been a bounty of research that considers literature through a sensory framework. Literary scholars of sensation, Annette Kern-Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson write in the introduction to their recent collection Literature and the Senses (2023), seek “to reveal the distinctive means by which literary texts mediate experience of the world”; they “show how the unique functions and capabilities of literature are suited to articulating and scrutinizing sense experience and to casting light on its not yet fully understood phenomenology.”13 There have been, for example, studies of how attention to the senses can inform our literary analysis of particular chronological periods, ranging from medieval to modern.14 There have also been sensory treatments of particular authors, such as Shakespeare, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and John Updike.15 Similar to emotion, scholars have investigated how attention to senses and sensation can inform other perennial interests of literary studies, such as race, queerness, and colonialism.16 Finally, researchers have considered the literary operation of particular senses, such as analysis of sight in sixteenth-century Italian drama and eighteenth-century Britain, smell in the Middle Ages and nineteenth-century urban America, sound in Caribbean and Latinx poetics and the Francophone postcolonial world, taste in early modern

13 Annette Kern-Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson, “Literature and the Senses: An Introduction,” in Literature and the Senses, ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 2; 1. 14 Simon C. Thomson and Michael D.J. Bintley, eds., Sensory Perception in the Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016); John Jervis, Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 15 Katharine A. Craik, Tanya Pollard, and Bruce R. Smith, eds., Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Guy J. Reynolds, Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021); Linda Voris, The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing (Cham: Palgrave, 2016); Scott Dill, A Theology of Sense: John Updike, Embodiment, and Late Twentieth-Century American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018). 16 Erica Fretwell, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite, eds., Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2018).

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Italy and eighteenth-century imperial Europe, and touch in Renaissance England and Modern Japan.17 But it’s not simply that scholars of literature have devoted concentrated attention to cognition, emotion, and sensation: they are also, quite crucially, thinking more and more about these processes in tandem. Parallel to developments in the discipline of history, literary scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the fact that the ways in which humans think, feel, and sense are inseparably entangled.18 Work on literature points to this; Zunshine’s Oxford Handbook to Cognitive Literary Studies, for example, contains an entire section on emotion, whereas The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (2022) contains numerous chapters anchored in cognitive science.19 For two decades, Hogan has been at the forefront of this movement, charting how the interrelation of cognitive and affective processes contributes to the generation and analysis of literature; indeed, one of his latest works announces itself as concerned with Affective-Cognitive Stylistics (2021).20 But many other 17 Javier Berzal de Dios, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); Chris Mounsey, Sight Correction: Vision and Blindness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019); Katelynn Robinson, The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages: A Source of Certainty (New York: Routledge, 2020); Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019); Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Yasser Elhariry, Sounds Senses (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022); Laura Giannetti, Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022); Robert Hames Merrett, Imperial Paradoxes: Training the Senses and Tasting the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021); Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Fusako Innami, Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021). 18 See Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Bradley J. Irish, “Historical Neurodiversity Studies: A New Paradigm of Experience,” History and Theory (2025) [forthcoming]. 19 Zunshine, Oxford Handbook; Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan, eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2022). 20 Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Style in

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scholars have also devoted full-length treatment to the various intersections of cognition, emotion, and sensation, exemplified by books such as Sue J. Kim’s On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013), Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson’s Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life: Memory, Place and the Senses (2015), Brian J. Reilly’s Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages (2018), Lisa Beaven and Angela Ndalianis’s Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses: Baroque to Neo-Baroque (2018), and Tara McDonald’s Narrative, Affect and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (2023).21 There is thus a growing awareness that cognitive, emotional, and sensory processes are importantly connected, as the boundaries between each are quite fuzzy, often to the point that it is impossible to delineate their separate contributions to a particular subjective experience. The books cited in the previous paragraphs represent only a fraction of the literary scholarship on cognition, emotion, and sensation produced over the last two decades—and I have only mentioned fulllength books, not the many hundreds of articles and chapters on these subjects! Although there is a casual, intuitive sense that this work is vaguely related—most obviously, of course, in scholarship that examines how mental processes work together—there has been little explicit attempt to consider research on literary cognition, emotion, and sensation as belonging to the same larger conceptual category. I believe, however, that there is good reason to think about this work collectively, as united by its shared interest in mind-contingent phenomena: scholarship on the cognitive, emotional, and sensory aspects of literature can, I think, be rightly said to comprise a neurological approach to literary analysis. And though few people would instantly think of it in this way—partly because there’s no collective identity around neurological approaches to literature—based on research output alone, we must see it as quietly Narrative: Aspects of an Affective-Cognitive Stylistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 21 Sue J. Kim, On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson, eds., Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art, and Everyday Life: Memory, Place, and the Senses (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Brian J. Reilly, Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 2018); Lisa Beaven and Angela Ndalianis, eds., Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses: Baroque to Neo-Baroque (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2018); Tara MacDonald, Narrative, Affect and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

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representing a truly major theoretical approach to literary analysis. The problem is simply that the literary profession doesn’t tend to see this scholarship as similarly focused, despite the fact that it is all clearly devoted to the study of mind-contingent phenomena. What can be gained by thinking about cognitive, emotional, and sensory literary studies under the same umbrella? For one thing, in professional terms, it makes these interrelated fields more visible and legible. As noted above, there is already an inherent sense among scholars that such topics are related, and the connections are sometimes explored informally, on an ad hoc basis. However, the fact that the fields are relatively siloed encourages the profession to underestimate both the quantity and importance of literary research that is being conducted on the contours of subjective experience—research, I suggest, which is united by its grounding in the neurological. By grouping work on how we think, feel, and sense in one conceptual category, it instantly becomes clear that these are not minor, eccentric, or unnecessary areas of inquiry: the neurological dimensions of literary experience are every bit as important as tending to matters of (say) race, class, gender, or sexuality, or genre, form, or style. (And, indeed, neurological analysis can equally help inform all those theoretical approaches.) Thinking collectively allows us to freshly appreciate the contributions of these fields, just as it encourages others to join their shared endeavors. But beyond professional status and standing, it simply makes good intellectual sense for us to think jointly about matters of literary cognition, emotion, and sensation. I have already mentioned the growing awareness that how we think, feel, and sense are all entwined, and research is being conducted on these interconnections. Uniting three disparate, but obviously related fields will provide the opportunity for new modes of inquiry, new collaborations, and new kinds of discovery. This does not, of course, mean that literary cognitive studies, literary emotional studies, and literary sensory studies will simply abandon their individual identities; there are good reasons for these fields to continue to emphasize their particular interests and strengths. I’m just saying that it is also useful to think of these fields as working toward the common goal of elucidating human neurological functioning, because they are already separately doing just that. So my first intervention is to suggest that literary scholars generally working on the topics of cognition, emotion, and sensation might benefit from seeing themselves as mutually invested in the neurological analysis

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of literature: thinking of their efforts as united under a general conceptual umbrella will not only give a more visible and prominent scholarly identity to their research on mind-contingent phenomena, it also would organically help encourage more investigation of the vital ways that cognitive, emotional, and sensory processes work in tandem. More importantly, we may now return to the specific matter of neurodiversity, and to my larger vision for the future of literary neurodiversity studies. As we saw in the last chapter, existing work on literature and neurodiversity has, for all practical purposes, focused entirely on the dynamics of neurodivergence: that is, the emphasis is on how atypical forms of cognitive, emotional, and sensory styles contribute to the generation and analysis of literature, from the study of neurodivergent (or possibly neurodivergent) fictional characters, to the study of neurodivergent authors and readers, to the study of neurodivergent forms of language and expression. This is obviously for good reason: the very concept of neurodiversity emerged from an activist context, and neurodivergent people face, and have always faced, systemic marginalization and oppression. The political commitments of literary neurodiversity studies ensure that neurodivergence and neurodivergent voices are centered in the field, and this is exactly how it should be. But while literary neurodiversity studies points to the vital ways that atypical cognitive, emotional, and sensory styles contribute to the interpretation and production of literary meaning, I want to suggest that this is not the only matter when it comes to literature and neurodiversity. As discussed in the Introduction, neurodiversity theory broadly asks us to abandon the concept of neurological “norms”—though there are still practical strategic reasons to think in terms of typicality and divergence, the larger project is to view human minds within an infinite spectrum of different functioning styles, some of which simply happen to be more common in the human population than others. Because of this, I think that it naturally becomes the case that our fullest and most complete understanding (and appreciation) of human neurodiversity is contingent on engaging the fullest analytical range possible. As such, I want to make the radical suggestion that all analysis of cognition, emotion, and sensation—whether or not it emphasizes atypical processes —contributes to our knowledge of human neurodiversity—and thus all work on literary cognition, literary emotion, or literary sensation may be rightly said to fall under the umbrella of literary neurodiversity studies, whether or not it emphasizes neurodivergence. Countless scholars, I suggest, are already

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doing literary neurodiversity studies, because their work helps us see how the ways we think, feel, and sense contribute to literary meaning. They may not think of themselves as scholars of literary neurodiversity, but I invite them to do so—just as I invite anyone interested in the literary implications of cognition, emotion, or sensation to take part in the development of this exciting field. Literary neurodiversity studies, I thus propose, can function as a broad field uniting scholars interested in a neurological approach to analyzing literature—whether they focus on literary cognition, emotion, sensation, neurodivergence, or some entangled nexus of them all. As the field currently stands, literary neurodiversity studies emphasizes the analysis of atypical neurological function; I, rather differently, have attempted to drastically expand the purview of the field, by making the case that all scholarship on literary cognition, emotion, and sensation contributes to our understanding of literary neurodiversity, whether or not it prioritizes the specific matter of neurodivergence. Where, then, does this leave the field’s traditional intellectual and political commitments to neurodivergence? There are, to be certain, crucial ethical concerns that naturally arise from the methodological shift that I’m proposing. One can quite reasonably ask (as an eminent scholar of literary neurodiversity posed to me), “can an analysis of neurodiversity that doesn’t explicitly advance neurodivergent liberation really be understood as a legitimate example of neurodiversity studies?” Different thinkers will inevitably answer this question in different ways, and I suspect that many of my colleagues— especially my fellow neurodivergent colleagues—will maintain that the active exploration (and celebration) of neurodivergent perspectives must be the sine non qua of literary neurodiversity studies. This is a perfectly reasonable position, one with which I completely agree. There is a very real danger that an expanded vision of literary neurodiversity might become diluted or homogenized by a focus on more normative forms of cognition, emotion, and sensation, to the extent that neurodivergent modes of being become an afterthought, and the work and insights of neurodivergent scholars get pushed to the margins. This, obviously, would be a very bad thing, and something that must not be allowed to happen, whatever the future of literary neurodiversity studies. As an autistic and ADHD scholar, I am unsurprisingly very invested in both the intellectual exploration of neurodivergence and in the liberation of neurodivergent people, and I would not even consider

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proposing an expanded scholarly perspective on neurodiversity if I didn’t believe that it could be done in an ethical and responsible manner. I hope that my scholarship on specific matters of literary neurodivergence, as well as my experience working with and supporting neurodivergent scholars, will attest to the seriousness of my commitments. So I want to make explicitly clear: if the purview of literary neurodiversity studies is to expand, the field must continue to consciously emphasize and prioritize the study of neurodivergence and the interests of neurodivergent people. This is absolute and non-negotiable. Scholars of literary neurodivergence are the pioneers of literary neurodiversity studies, and the modes of analysis with which they founded the field must continue to be celebrated, utilized, and expanded upon. I simply believe that their efforts can also be put in conversation with other treatments of cognition, emotion, and sensory experience, to give us the fullest picture of how literature emerges from human neurodiversity. As a neurodivergent scholar invested in the study of literary neurodivergence, I assure you: I make my suggestions about the field at large only because I believe that the analysis of neurodivergent literature will be enhanced, rather than overwhelmed or washed out, by a broader, more comprehensive sense of what it means to study literary neurodiversity. A parallel form of inquiry is present in other areas of scholarship that concern social identity: for example, because of the development of critical race studies and whiteness studies, it is now instantly apparent that the construct of race can be analyzed in any literary text, whether or not that text explicitly depicts or represents characters belonging to an ostensible racial minority. In my field of Shakespeare studies, David Sterling Brown points to the example of Much Ado About Nothing —“racial matters,” he argues, “present themselves as complicated and deep in this play,” despite the fact that it “does not contain somatic Blackness [in that] an actual Black person, or even the representation of a Black person, never appears onstage.”22 This reflects the larger point that “where there are people, there you will find race, because race is always happening…[it] always matters and makes meaning, even when racialized whiteness is the only quality on display” (18). Without positing a vulgar or uncritical similarity between race and neurological functioning—which are obviously two entirely different 22 David Sterling Brown, Shakespeare’s White Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 6.

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things with vastly different implications—Brown’s statement about race nonetheless remains true if we substitute in neurodiversity: neurodiversity is always happening, and it always matters and makes meaning, even when neurotypicality is the only quality on ostensible display. In other words, an expanded view of neurodiversity makes it possible to examine the dynamics of neurological functioning in any literary text, whether or not they explicitly depict ostensibly neurodivergent characters or ostensibly neurodivergent ways of expression. Not only would this drastically enhance the purview, relevance, and significance of literary neurodiversity studies— by showing that we can read anything neurologically—but it would also greatly contribute to our more specific understanding of literary neurodivergence, because knowledge about the construction, operation, and representation of neurotypicality will necessarily strengthen our analysis of neurodivergence. Though we do not, we have seen, inherently need to view atypical neurological styles in terms of more typical ones, the fact is that (practically speaking) concepts of neurodivergence are to some important degree shaped via the discourse of neurotypicality—this provides the supposed “norm” from which atypical minds are said to diverge. So paying attention to neurological functioning and neurodiversity at large, I think, will only better our ability to comprehend (and advocate for) the marginalized and pathologized forms of neurological being that are at the political and ethical heart of neurodiversity studies. Furthermore, there is a sense in which considering all analyses of cognition, emotion, and sensation as contributing to a shared interest in human neurodiversity can help advance one of the fundamental activist principles of the neurodiversity paradigm: the destabilizing of a neurological “norm.” As we’ve seen, neurodiversity scholars have increasingly troubled the idea that any neurological style should be conceptually enshrined as normal —just as there is no “normal” gender or ethnicity, there are simply some forms of neurological functioning that are more statistically common in the human population. While the theoretical distinction between neurotypical and neurodivergent styles does vital intellectual and political work in some contexts—and neurodiversity studies will surely want to keep this distinction available for many strategic purposes—in another sense, thinking of neurological functioning as a unified concept populated by equally valid clusters of greater and smaller frequency helps to destigmatize and legitimize forms of neurological difference, by dissolving the “norm” from which certain minds are said to “diverge.” To envision a professional conference, for example, in which the analysis of

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less typical forms of neurological functioning stood unremarkably alongside the analysis of more typical forms, is to imagine a scholarly setting in which the study (and existence) of neurodivergence is seen as natural and necessary as that of neurotypicality. This does not, of course, mean that we would abandon intellectual contexts that are explicitly dedicated to neurodivergence—as the marginalized and vulnerable subject position, it must continue to receive special attention. But thinking of all forms of neurological functioning in tandem has the potential to greatly increase the collective scholarly investment in the way that minds and bodies work, which (it seems to me) will only spell good things for those of us who are committed to neurodivergence and neurodivergent people. Finally, there is simply the more practical sense that inviting scholars of emotion, cognition, and sensation to consider their work in terms of neurodiversity will, in all likelihood, help shine a larger spotlight on the more specific topic of neurodivergence, which will benefit the current investments of literary neurodiversity studies. When more scholars begin to think about neurodiversity, it seems quite likely that more scholars will equally think about neurodivergence, and when literary neurodiversity studies at large occupies a larger piece of the critical terrain, this will naturally bring more prominence to the study of literary neurodivergence. So there is, I think, a sensible and productive way to reconceptualize the scope of what it means to think about literary neurodiversity. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that there won’t be growing pains in the future I’m envisioning. A specific proviso, for example, must be made with regard to cognitive literary studies. I am obviously suggesting that cognitive literary studies should embrace the neurodiversity paradigm, and understand itself as contributing to a shared intellectual investment in the infinite range of human neurological functioning—but, as I mentioned in the Introduction, the fact is that cognitive literary studies has a pretty rough history when it comes to treating neurodiversity. In the earlier part of the twenty-first century, work on literature and cognition often took a reductive, even dehumanizing approach to topics like autism, and this is something we must reckon with if neurodiversity studies is going to make space more broadly for scholars of literary cognition. Though we know that intent doesn’t really matter when it comes to harm, I do personally think that earlier cognitive scholars didn’t mean or understand the intellectual and ethical shortcomings of their approach— they were, in many ways, simply following the dehumanizing mainstream scientific narrative of the time. I also don’t think it’s necessary for me to

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go back and explicitly engage this problematic work of literary criticism— not only because I’d rather avoid platforming it, but also because I know firsthand that some of these cognitive scholars have revised their thinking, and now have a much deeper appreciation of neurodiversity and neurodivergence. But the fact remains that if the broad umbrella of neurodiversity studies is going to include the study of cognition, and if cognitive literary scholars are going to start understanding their work in terms of neurodiversity, it is vital that they actively embrace the neurodiversity paradigm and celebrate neurological difference. As I’ve said, the expanded conceptualization of literary neurodiversity I propose is still founded on the principle of intellectually and politically prioritizing neurodivergence, so this should hopefully guide scholars from adjacent fields coming to the topic of neurodiversity. And thinkers already invested in neurodiversity can also continue to forge connections with cognitive literary studies, making sure that the treatment of neurodivergence is done responsibly in a cognitive framework. Seymour, whose Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (2023) takes a cognitive approach, is in her ongoing work especially attentive to the ways that earlier cognitive literary theory harmfully misrepresented the neurodivergent experience, as well as to how a more nuanced and ethical treatment of neurodiversity can enhance the cognitive analysis of literature; this is a model for us all to follow.23 But I think that such concerns can be addressed head-on, and that there is an ethically responsible and intellectually promising path forward. Political movements—especially identity-based movements—are often marked by both inclusive, conciliatory impulses and more radical, agonistic ones.24 While not everyone agrees, I personally think that each mode productively serves different purposes and accomplishes different things, and I thus believe that both have a place in our shared commitment to neurological justice. For this reason, I understand my wider approach to literary neurodiversity to be in complement, not opposition to existing work on critical neurodiversity and neurodivergence, and I hope that my colleagues in the field will see it as that way too. The vital intellectual and political work of critical neurodiversity studies must 23 Laura Seymour, Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023). 24 See for example, Sarah Maddison, “Agonistic Reconciliation: Inclusion, Decolonisation and the Need for Radical Innovation,” Third World Quarterly 43, no. 6 (2022): 1307–23.

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continue and must be supported, and the somewhat alternate approach that I propose is in no way intended to undermine or diminish it. I simply believe that inviting other scholarly fields to envision their work in terms of human neurological diversity—while still, of course, highlighting and emphasizing neurodivergence—will only work to further depathologize neurological difference, which I see as the primary aim of neurodiversity studies at large. I’ll say it a final time: the particular analysis of neurodivergent modes of being must remain at the center of literary neurodiversity studies. But I hope to have made a convincing argument for why it also might make good sense to expand the boundaries of the field, and encourage scholars of cognition, emotion, and sensation generally to think of themselves as contributing to a united interest in human neurodiversity. If my fellow scholars of literary neurodiversity reject this proposal, I won’t be upset; I truly understand, acknowledge, and to some degree share concerns that this path could potentially obscure our necessary commitment to the interests of neurodivergent people. But I do think there is intellectual and professional possibility here—and above all, as I have mentioned, I would not recommend it if I thought it would ultimately harm our ability to do the vital work that we’re already doing. In the next chapter, I’ll try to show you what this recommendation looks like in practice.

CHAPTER 4

Case Study: Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence in Othello

Abstract This chapter uses Shakespeare’s Othello as a case study of how one might perform a neurological analysis of literature. It first treats the potential neurodivergence of central characters Iago and Othello, demonstrating how any literary figure might be understood via their neurological identity. It then treats the entwined matters of cognition, emotion, and sensation more generally in the play, to illustrate how we might broadly read a text in terms of neurodiversity. Keywords Othello · Shakespeare · Neurological analysis · Neurological identity · Cognition · Emotion · Sensation · Neurodivergence

To conclude this book, I’ll offer a particular case study of how one might attempt a neurological analysis in the expanded way that I have just proposed. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I am a scholar of early modern literature and culture, and there has been a particular concentration of important research on neurodiversity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to the efforts of brilliant scholars like Bridget M. Bartlett, Jes Battis, Wes Folkerth, Nicholas R. Helms, Olivia Henderson, Melinda Marks, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 B. J. Irish, Literary Neurodiversity Studies, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2_4

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Laura Seymour, and Lisa Ulevich.1 So I naturally will choose a work of literature from this period. I use the example of Shakespeare’s Othello, which is a text that particularly invites discussion about the workings of neurological functioning; it is also a rather canonical text, so my analysis will be easier to follow for those not in my own field of early modern studies. (What’s more, it is a text that I’ve been thinking and writing about for my entire career.) In terms of neurology, I think that Othello wonderfully demonstrates the potential of the kind of analytic method that I began to envision in the last chapter. However expansive literary neurodiversity studies might become, I have stressed that it must continue to center and prioritize the experience of neurodivergence; Othello is a text that provides opportunity to realize this aim, as atypical forms of cognitive, emotional, and sensory style are important features of the tragedy. But more broadly, in a larger neurological sense, Othello is also a play deeply invested in exploring the larger workings of cognition, emotion, and sensation—especially as they 1 Bartlett, “Macbeth’s Idiot and Faulkner’s Compsons”; Bartlett, “‘An Idiot of the Newest Cut’”; Bridget M. Bartlett, “Developmental Disability as Material, Metaphor, and Essential Difference in an Elizabethan Morality Play,” in Shaping Intellectual Disability in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alice Equestri. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025 (forthcoming); Bridget M. Bartlett and Bradley J. Irish, “Early Modern Neurodiversity: A Preliminary Research Agenda,” ELH , 2025 (forthcoming); Jes Battis, “‘No Crime to Be Bashful’: Social Anxiety in the Drama of Margaret Cavendish,” Mosaic 52, no. 2 (2019): 167–84; Wes Folkerth, “Reading Shakespeare After Neurodiversity,” in Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Leslie C. Dunn (New York: Palgrave, 2020), 141–57; Nicholas R. Helms, “Seeing Brains: Shakespeare, Autism, and Self-Identification,” in Redefining Disability, ed. Paul D.C. Bones, Jessica Smartt Gullion, and Danielle Barber (Boston: Brill, 2022), 152–59; Henderson, “‘Like a Dull Actor”; Olivia Henderson, “‘Vanish, Follies, with Your Mother’: Fools, Intellectual Disability, and Neurodiversity in Ben Jonson’s Masques,” in Shaping Intellectual Disability in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alice Equestri (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025) (forthcoming); Marks and Irish, “Shakespeare, Neurological Identity”; Loftis, Shakespeare and Disability; Loftis and Ulevich, “Obsession/Rationality/Agency”; Mardy Philippian Jr., “The Book of Common Prayer, Theory of Mind, and Autism in Early Modern England,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 150–66; Laura Seymour, “The Uses of Anxiety: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,” Bunyan Studies 26 (2022): 8–27; Seymour, “Shakespearean Echolalia”; Seymour, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity; Seymour, “Copying Not Diagnosing”; Laura Seymour, “‘All Discourses But Mine Own Afflict Me’: Morose’s House as a Seventeenth-Century Autistic Utopia,” in Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture, ed. Jenny Bergenmar, Louise Creechan, and Anna Stenning (London: Bloomsbury, 2025) [forthcoming].

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are entwined—which helps us see the utility of understanding such themes as united under the conceptual umbrella of neurology. My goal in what follows is not to offer a singular, authoritative neurological “reading” of Shakespeare’s play—in most cases, that’s probably as fruitless (and reductive) a task as trying to give one singular, authoritative account of race or gender in a particular literary text. The point instead is to demonstrate the extent to which neurological thematics swirl throughout Othello, as forms of cognitive, emotional, and sensory functioning—both typical and divergent, and often entwined—contribute enormously to how the play works. While there has been scholarship that separately treats matters of cognition, emotion, and sensation in the play, I’ll argue that a complete analysis of the play’s psychic landscape must especially consider neurological matters collectively, as Shakespeare insistently shows the interplay between the various components of neurology.2 A neurological reading in the manner I propose uses the principles of neurodiversity and neurodivergence to engage literary texts in light of this entanglement—and the analytical practice I’ll try to model here, I suggest, can be applied to any piece of literature. It is appropriate to start with neurodivergence, since the topic is so essential to a neurological approach. Indeed, some of the earliest work on early modern neurodiversity concerned the potential neurodivergence of Iago; a decade ago, Paul Cefalu suggested that the character’s “cognitive capacities are so overmastering” that he suffers from a hypermindedness that might “place him on the extreme end of the autism scale,” as a person

2 See, for example, Paul Cefalu, Tragic Cognition in Shakespeare’s Othello: Beyond the Neural Sublime (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2015); Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters; Max J. Van Duijn et al., “When Narrative Takes Over: The Representation of Embedded Mindstates in Shakespeare’s Othello,” Language and Literature 24, no. 2 (2015): 148–66; Cora Fox, “Othello’s Unfortunate Happiness,” in Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Carol Mejia LaPerle (Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022), 187–204; Irish, Shakespeare and Disgust; Bríd Phillips, “From Aaron to Othello: The Changing Emotional Register of Blackness in Shakespeare,” in Matters of Engagement: Emotions, Identity, and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World, ed. Daniela Hacke, Claudia Jarzebowski, and Hannes Ziegler (New York: Routledge, 2021), 290–310; Eamon Grennan, “The Women’s Voices in Othello: Speech, Song, Silence,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1987): 275–92; Michael Lutz, “Poisoned Sight: Race and the Material Phantasm in Othello,” Journal of Narrative Theory 49, no. 3 (2019): 1–25; Benjamin Steingass, “Othello-dor: Racialized Odor in and on Othello,” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 22, no. 37 (2020): 1–20.

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who is “hyperaware of selected fragments of the mind” and thus experiences “obsessive but faulty mindfulness.”3 As Helms has subsequently shown, this analysis relies on some of the problematic ToM assumptions that I mentioned in the Introduction—but even if we don’t see Iago in terms of autism, it’s perfectly possible to view the character via the lens of atypical neurological functioning.4 It does seem to me that Iago’s mind is exceptional: his ability to shape the psychological experience of others is probably unrivaled in Renaissance drama. This is at the core of Helms’s argument, which sees Iago as a social parasite who is able to expertly manipulate the minds of other characters by leveraging the power of inference. Iago, he writes, “concocts complex situations that overload others’ abilities to infer his mental states”—a technique that causes his hapless victims to misrecognize and misevaluate, resulting in cognitive failures that the villain is able to exploit to his own end.5 (We see this in his manipulation of Roderigo, Cassio, and of course Othello— more on that below.) However, it is not simply that he is hypercognitive; he is also hyperemotional. The entire action of the play revolves around Iago’s affective orientation toward Othello, who variously triggers in him an overwhelming hatred, envy, and jealousy. Iago, in fact, leans into the experience of emotion, actively allowing it to guide his cognition: “I hate the Moor” (1.3.366), he famously declares, And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets He has done my office. I know not if ’t be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do as if for surety. (386–389)6

His preexisting hatred encourages him to take as fact an unverifiable rumor of Emilia’s infidelity, which then gives rise to a jealousy that further fuels his hate. Iago’s jealousy is so extreme, in fact, that Mary FloydWilson describes him as approximating “the quintessential jealous man” in early modern culture; as Loren Cressler puts it, he becomes “infected

3 Cefalu, Tragic Cognition, 4; 30. 4 Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters. 5 Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters, 47. 6 Quotations from William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann and Ayanna

Thompson (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

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with the very kind of self-sustaining jealousy that he will use to manipulate Othello.”7 Emotional atypicality is another form of neurodivergence, and it seems that Iago’s exaggerated manner of both thinking and feeling might reflect a relatively unique kind of neurodiversity. In his particular cognitive and emotional styles, Iago offers a fantastic opportunity to apply the non-diagnostic approach advocated by Seymour in Chapter 2—we don’t need to use a particular medical label to nonetheless acknowledge that his neurological functioning seems atypical within the social world he inhabits. Besides Iago, Othello is another character who can quite easily be considered in terms of neurodivergence. For one thing, his instance of “epilepsy” would qualify as neurologically atypical by just about any modern definition (4.1.50). While it’s hard to know precisely how to understand Othello’s medical history—Iago claims to Cassio that he had had another seizure the day before, though we obviously do not see it (51)—his episode has been said to reflect “the play’s conflict of reason and emotion,” and there are obvious ways in which the presentation of a neurologically disabled Othello compounds the alienation of his racial otherness.8 We’ll see more on race below, but considering Othello as neurologically “othered” adds a new dimension to the racial violence he experiences in the play, analogous to what we saw in Chapter 2 of how disabled postcolonial subjects are “doubly colonized.” Othello not only must navigate a Venice in which he is somatically marked as racially alien, he must negotiate a social world where he is neurologically atypical—and it’s obvious that a large part of his tragedy stems from how his individuated mind interacts with the minds of other characters in the play. What’s more, apart from his individuated mind, there is a way that his racial identity further complicates how early modern English audiences would assess his neurological identity, because, the early modern English understood people from other nations, races, and ethnic groups to have 7 Loren Cressler, “Malcontented Iago and Revenge Tragedy Conventions in Othello,” Studies in Philology 116, no. 1 (2019): 92; Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139. 8 Thomas M. Vozar, “Body-Mind Aporia in the Seizure of Othello,” Philosophy and

Literature 36, no. 1 (2012): 183; see also Allison P. Hobgood, “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2009), https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/ 993/1184; Roxana Cazan, “‘What Shall We Hear of This’: Understanding Judgment, Epilepsy in William Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” Neophilologus 98, no. 3 (2014): 503–16.

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characteristically different kinds of minds—so they thought, to use this particular example, that Moors were dispositionally inclined to think, feel, sense, and act in certain stereotypical kinds of ways. This, for example, accounts for the famous early modern understanding that Moors like Othello were particularly susceptible to jealousy—meaning that Othello’s own particular neurological identity in the play is entwined with the neurological qualities assigned to his racial group, which all further intersect with matters of race and racism.9 And more broadly still, both Cefalu and Helms note that Othello is characterized by his repeated failures of mindreading, given that he fatally misjudges the thoughts and intentions of Iago, Cassio, and Desdemona; though we cannot, of course, vulgarly diagnose neurologically atypical individuals as “mindblind,” it is nonetheless true that some neurodivergent people do experience difficulties when it comes to inferring the mental state of others. This, combined with (as we’ll see) the extent to which his susceptibility to cognitive manipulation is enabled by his powerful overflow of passion, invites us to consider Othello as neurologically atypical—again, in a way that does not require labeling him in any particular way. For good reason, then, we can think of both Iago and Othello in terms of neurological difference: the way that each character thinks, feels, and/ or senses often seems somewhat divergent from the “norm” of the world they inhabit. Accordingly, a neurological approach to literary analysis can particularly focus on instances of explicit or presumed neurodivergence in plays, prose, or poems, to account for how less common types of cognition, emotion, and sensation manifest in the characters they depict. But, consistent with my larger intent to widen the scope of literary neurodiversity studies, I want to also argue something larger: I believe that any literary character, regardless of how typical or atypical we understand their mind to be, has a neurological identity, just as they have a racial identity or a gender identity or a sexual identity. (And this applies to subjects in the real world, too!) That is, just like how a character need not belong to a racial minority to have a racial identity, so too does one need not be neurodivergent to have a neurological identity—and, because of this, a neurological literary analysis can investigate the neurological identity of literally any character, because any character can be understood in 9 For discussion, see Bradley J. Irish, “Just How Remarkable Was the ‘Jealous Moor’? Othello, Jealousy and Early Modern Racial Stereotypes,” Shakespeare (2024): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2024.2304029.

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terms of their cognitive, emotional, and sensory features. While literary neurodiversity studies must prioritize neurodivergence, that doesn’t mean that we can’t also investigate how more neurologically typical characters think, feel, and sense—and doing so, in fact, contributes to our broader understanding of how a text depicts neurodiversity at large. (Indeed, just as how ignoring the racial construction of whiteness implicitly contributes to the fact that whiteness is normalized as the “default” race, so too does only talking about neurology in terms of divergent neurological functioning implicitly normalize and regularize neurotypicality as the default standard of being.) Accordingly, I suggest that neurological identity can be understood as a bedrock category of social identity, analogous to (and intersecting with) other identity markers like race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.; in terms of literary study, analyzing a character’s neurological identity simply entails considering what you’re told (and what you can determine) about the manners in which they think, feel, and sense, as well as how such aspects of being situate them in their world. One day, I hope, investigating a character’s neurological identity will be as immediate and obvious an analytical technique as investigating their more familiar qualities of social being—because how we exist neurologically, I think, plays an equally important role in shaping who we are and helps determine our subjective life at large. Tending to the neurological identity of characters is perhaps the easiest and most obvious way to perform a neurological reading of a literary text. But such an approach can also be wider still: work in literary neurodiversity studies can analyze how the entire range of neurological matters manifest in a particular text, at the level not only of characterization, but also at the level of language, theme, plot, etc. This entails not only accounting for how cognitive, emotional, and sensory matters manifest particularly, but also being attentive to how such things regularly entwine and shape each other. To conclude this chapter, I want to demonstrate how we might take this approach with Othello—because the play, I think, is incessantly interested in matters neurological, quite beyond the more specific neurodivergence of Iago and Othello. We should start by returning to the issue of race, because any analysis of Othello must prioritize the racial dynamics of the play—a fact now more apparent than ever, thanks to the explosion of interest in

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Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) in the last decade.10 Recent scholars have demonstrated the numerous ways that race, race-making, and racism shape different aspects of Othello; Urvashi Chakravarty, for example, explores race and political theology in the play, Dennis Austin Britton explores race and pity, Justin Shaw explores race and disability; Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw explores racial trauma and the law, and Patricia Akhimie explores how race is somatically marked.11 In a series of books 10 Of course, scholars have been doing important work on race in the early modern period for decades—but race has come to the forefront of Renaissance studies in recent years. Margo Hendricks put forth a framework for PCRS in the 2019 lecture “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race” (https://www.folger.edu/institute/schola rly-programs/race-periodization/margo-hendricks) and in the follow up essay “Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: RaceB4Race,” New Literary History 52, no. 3–4 (2021): 365–84; see also Margo Hendricks, “Race and Nation,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1: 663–68; Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 1–13 [the Rest of This Issue Is Devoted to Race]; Jason Demeter and Ayanna Thompson, “Shakespeare and Early Modern Race Studies: An Overview of the Field,” The Shakespearean World, ed. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby (London: Routledge, 2017), 574–89; Urvashi Chakravarty, “The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 50, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 17–24; Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Arthur L. Little, Jr. “Critical Race Studies,” in The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 139–58. 11 Urvashi Chakravarty, “Race, Natality, and the Biopolitics of Early Modern Political Theology,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 140–66; Dennis Austin Britton, “Contaminatio, Race, and Pity in Othello,” in Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, ed. Dennis Austin Britton and Melissa Walter (New York: Routledge, 2018), 46–64; Justin Shaw, “‘Rub Him About the Temples’: Othello, Disability, and the Failures of Care,’” Early Theatre, 22, no. 2 (2019): 171–84; Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw, “‘The Moor’s Abused by Some Most Villainous Knave, Some Base Notorious Knave, Some Scurvy Fellow”: Legal Spaces, Racial Trauma and Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 75 (2022): 103–21. Patricia Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2018), Chap. 1. See also the other articles in Shakespeare Survey 75, which is entirely devoted to Othello. For slightly earlier examples of work on Othello and race, see Ian Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief,” Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–25; Ian Smith, “Seeing Blackness: Reading Race in Othello,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 405–420; ibid., “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–24; ibid., Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming Christian: Race,

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and articles, I have examined the affective dynamics of race in Othello, arguing that racial violence in the play is fundamentally underwritten by the emotion of disgust. Iago, I suggest, is most basically motivated by a racial disgust for his master—a disgust that shapes his hatred, envy, and jealousy—and the action of the play entails the villain inducing this disgust in his fellow Venetians, and even ultimately in Othello himself.12 So neurological matters, in the form of emotion, have always been prioritized in my reading of Othello. But what my previous analysis did not account for, however, is the full scope of neurological functioning in the play: that is, how the thematics of emotion are deeply connected to thematics of both cognition and sensation. So while I have foregrounded emotion in my prior reading, the lens of neurodiversity and neurodivergence allows me to offer an even more complete account of the play’s depiction of mental life, by revealing how the psychic world of Othello must be understood via the operation of all aspects of neurology. In Othello, Shakespeare insists that we must see cognition, emotion, and sensation as mental processes that work in tandem. Only moments into the play, Iago famously opines on the subject, describing the mental principle he claims to live by: If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. (1.3.327–332)

This, of course, reflects commonplace thinking in the Western philosophical tradition, but over the course of the play we learn how shockingly Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Peter Erickson, “Race Words in Othello,” in Shakespeare and Immigration, ed. Rubin Espinosa and Davit Ruiter (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 159–76; Imtiaz Habib, “The Black Alien in Othello: Beyond the European Immigrant” in Espinosa and Ruiter, eds., Shakespeare and Immigration, 135–58; Heinz Antor, “Constructing Alterity: Race, Gender, and the Body in Shakespeare’s Othello,” in Performing the Renaissance Body: Essays on Drama, Law, and Representation, ed. Sidia Fiorato and John Drakakis (Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2016), 73–105; Jean E. Howard, “Is Black So Base a Hue,” in Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 107–113; Matthieu Chapman, Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama (New York: Routledge, 2017), Chap. 3. 12 See Irish, Shakespeare and Disgust; Irish, “Just How Remarkable Was the ‘Jealous Moor’?”; Irish, The Rivalrous Renaissance.

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off-base is Iago’s self-assessment: despite his significant cognitive skills, he surpasses all other characters in emotional response, including Othello. The point is that Shakespeare invites us to consider the interplay of reason and passion by way of a character who claims to have control of his mental faculties, only to reveal that nothing could be further from the truth: this not only shows the morally suspect temperament of his treacherous villain, but also suggests the scale of the problem for humanity at large, given how cognitively sophisticated Iago is in other ways. To reinforce the theme, Othello addresses the interplay of reason and passion in his reaction to Cassio’s drunken brawl, as he fears being taken away by emotion: “My blood begins my safer guides to rule / And passion, having my best judgment collied, / Assays to lead the way” (2.3.201–203). Indeed, recalling Iago’s own self-conception, Othello’s measured ability to restrain his passions is actually a legendary feature of his character; Lodovico, shocked to see Othello strike his wife, wonders is “this the nature / Whom passion could not shake?” (4.1.265–266). (This anticipates Desdemona, confused by her husband’s drastic change in temperament, observing that “some bloody passion shakes your very frame” [5.2.44].) But the problem, of course, is that reason and passion cannot be so easily separated, and that is at the crux of the play’s dramatic conflict; indeed, Iago is well aware that emotion is able to overwhelm cognitive processes, as when he notes that Othello’s “unbookish jealousy must construe / Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures, and light behavior / Quite in the wrong” (4.1.102–104). Othello, in fact, actually argues that emotion justifies one’s cognitive intuitions, as he figures that his visceral experience of anger is a natural confirmation of his wife’s infidelity: I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me this. (39–41)

What’s more, the cognitive manipulations of others can stir up dangerous passions, which Othello laments in his suicide speech: reflecting on how Iago’s psychological mastery led him to his downfall, he begs to be remembered as “one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” (5.2.343–344). The play doesn’t allow us to forget that emotion impinges upon thinking: from start to finish, Shakespeare places his characters in positions where affective processes shape cognitive ones.

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While the intermingling of reason and passion is a basic neurological framework for Othello, the play is more specifically invested in the question of how we can perceive what other people are thinking.13 “I am not what I am,” Iago famously reports in its opening moments, because one’s “outward action” need not “demonstrate / The native act and figure of [their] heart”; accordingly, successful social relations with others are premised on the need to probe their inner workings, to determine what truly guides their behavior (1.1.64; 60–61). Mindreading, ostensibly a cognitive process, is thus similarly shown to have a vital affective foundation, as we repeatedly see that one’s judgment of another’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions are shaped by their own emotional assessment of the situation. This theme is immediately introduced by the outrage and exasperation of Brabantio, who awakens to find that his daughter Desdemona “deceives me / Past thought” (163–164). As mentioned, I have argued that many of the Venetian characters are motivated by a racial disgust of Othello, and we see this clearly with Brabantio’s reasoning: given his own affective stance toward his new son-in-law, he literally cannot conceive of the fact that Desdemona might willingly elope with him.14 Consider the harangue he directs toward Othello: O thou foul thief, where hast thou stowed my daughter? Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her, For I’ll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound, Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation, Would ever have, t’ incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou? to fear, not to delight. Judge me the world if ’tis not gross in sense That thou hast practised on her with foul charms, Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals That weakens motion. (1.2.62–75)

13 See Cefalu, Tragic Cognition; Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters. 14 Irish, Shakespeare and Disgust.

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The words foul, gross, and sooty bosom, as well as the general accusation of witchcraft, suggest that Brabantio is motivated by a disgust response triggered by his daughter’s interracial relationship—and most importantly, he (quite wrongly) assumes that Desdemona would otherwise naturally feel the same way, in a failed act of mindreading. He’s so convinced, in fact, that he suggests that this would be self-evident to any observer: “judge me the world,” he exclaims, “if ‘tis not gross in sense / That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms.” As he brings his case to the Venetian senate, he doubles down on his misreading of Desdemona’s mind, declaring that “being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,” her “judgement maimed” could only result from the workings of nefarious magic (1.3.64–65; 100). His assessment of his daughter’s thoughts and motivations is clearly shaped by his own affective feelings toward Othello, as he imposes on her his own emotional state, which he naturally assumes she must share. Brabantio’s cognitive failure in the opening act helps establish the play’s incessant interest in mindreading, showing again how emotional processes threaten to overwhelm reasoning. But beyond these thematic considerations, the Brabantio sequence is even more important, because it lays the foundation for Iago’s psychological manipulation of others. That is, Iago takes Brabantio’s affective misreading of Desdemona’s mind and induces it in other characters, to bend them to his will. Consider, for example, how he characterizes Desdemona to the despairing Roderigo: Her eye must be fed, and what delight shall she have to look on the devil? When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be, again to inflame it, and to give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favor, sympathy in years, manners and beauties, all which the Moor is defective in. Now for want of these required conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor. (2.1.223–231)

Once again using the visceral language of disgust (“heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor”), he invites Roderigo to assess Desdemona’s mind in the same affectively fashioned way that Brabantio did— something Roderigo is readily able to do, given that his infamously racist animalization of Othello in the opening scene is itself grounded in the rhetoric of revulsion.

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But what’s even more insidious is that Iago finally comes to make this assessment of Desdemona’s mind ring true even to Othello. Put simply, in the famous “seduction” scene and its aftermath, Iago convinces his master to see himself as a foul and contaminated object, making him believe that his wife must naturally view him with the same racial disgust that Brabantio and Roderigo assume she would already have. After broaching the topic of infidelity, Iago first reminds of the extent to which “she did deceive her father,” by seeming “to shake, and fear your looks”; her duplicity was such that she gave “out such a seeming, / To seel her father’s eyes up, close as oak— / He thought ‘twas witchcraft” (3.3.209– 210; 213–215). This deception points to the supposed fact that her mind can’t be read, which allows Iago to posit that there is something unseemly and rotten about her motives: Ay, there’s the point: as, to be bold with you, Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereto we see, in all things, nature tends— Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. (232–237)

Iago literally suggests that Desdemona’s unnatural love for her husband reflects a tainted, disgusting mind: her interracial desire for him is foul, and she will likely “recoi[l] to her better judgment” (240). And Othello, primed by Brabantio to read his wife’s intentions in this way, is finally manipulated by Iago into understanding himself as an object of disgust, famously referring to his “black and begrimed” face and comparing himself to a “toad” that “live[s] upon the vapor of a dungeon” (390; 274–5). Othello’s reasoning becomes infected by this affective outlook, a pernicious reminder of the extent to which emotion can shape cognition, as it does here to disastrous ends. But Desdemona’s, of course, is not the only mind that Othello misreads: he also vitally misjudges both Iago and Cassio. Nor is disgust the only emotional touchstone of the play. Iago’s induction of jealousy in Othello is the other key nexus of cognition and emotion in the play, and it again shows the complex entwinement of neurological processes.15 15 On jealousy in Othello, see Gayle Allan, “Seized by the ‘Mirth-Marring Monster’: Old and New Theories of Jealousy in Othello,” in “Rapt in Secret Studies ”: Emerging

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Indeed, the play’s pivotal scene revolves around how Iago manipulates Othello into trying to read his mind: OTHELLO What dost thou think? IAGO Think, my lord? OTHELLO Think, my lord! Alas, thou echo’st me As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something. […] If thou dost love me Show me thy thought. (108–111; 118–119).

Rather ironically, Othello suggests that Iago’s honesty is such that he possesses an inner wisdom immune to the distortions of emotion; speaking of Iago’s purposeful hesitations and evasions, he says that “in a man that’s just / They’re close delations, working from the heart, / That passion cannot rule” (125–127). Taking the bait, Othello demands that his ancient “give thy worst of thoughts / The worst of words” (134– 135), which leads Iago to slyly protest that his own passions are such that his judgment cannot be trusted: I confess it is my nature’s plague To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy Shapes faults that are not—that your wisdom, From one that so imperfectly conceits Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his scattering and unsure observance. (149–154)

By denying his own skills at mindreading, he fatally ensnares Othello: from here, comes his famous admonition to “beware…of jealousy,” Shakespeares, ed. Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 31–47; David M. Bergeron, “George Wither’s Response to Othello,” in The Text, The Play, and the Globe: Essays on Literary Influence in Shakespeare’s World and His Work in Honor of Charles R. Forker, ed. Joseph Candido (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 265–83; Paul Dean, “Shakespeare’s Jealous Husbands: Othello and Leontes,” Use of English 62, no. 3 (2011): 240–55; Robert C. Evans, “Robert Burton, Jealousy, and Shakespeare’s Othello,” in Critical Insights: Othello, ed. Robert C. Evans (Ipswich: Sale Press-Grey House Publishing, 2021), 36–63.

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the “green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (167–169). With his master hooked, Iago now introduces sensation and perception in the mix, bidding him “look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio / Wear your eyes thus, not jealous nor secure” (200– 201). Disingenuously advising a position of neutrality, Iago suggests that Othello simply trust his senses—knowing full well that “trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong /As proofs of holy writ” (325–327). This, of course, inaugurates Othello’s obsession with “ocular proof,” as determining Desdemona’s guilt or innocence becomes contingent on making meaning out of what his eyes see and his ears hear (363). But, just as passion manipulates reason, so too does it bias the senses, and the play’s entanglement of cognition, emotion, and sensation leads Othello to his tragic end. In Othello, then, it is impossible to separate matters of thinking, feeling, and sensing: Shakespeare shows how these processes endlessly impinge upon each other. For this reason, the fullest account of the play’s psychological dynamics comes from what may be called a neurological one: that is, an approach that doesn’t only consider cognition, emotion, or sensation independently, but that also charts their complex interplay. This, I suggest, is the kind of work that a unified literary neurodiversity studies might enable, by inviting us to freshly consider the collective insights of cognitive, emotional, and sensory treatments of the play. Exploring the neurological identity of Iago and Othello points to these characters’ potential neurodivergence, while a neurological reading of the play more generally allows us to see how matters of cognition, emotion, and sensory are thematically entangled in the tragedy, quite apart from whether any of the individual characters are determined to be neurologically atypical. This form of analysis, I fundamentally argue, is possible for virtually any literary text, early modern or otherwise. The reading I’ve presented in this chapter is designed to show one possible way that, practically speaking, my expanded vision of literary neurodiversity studies might play out. I believe that thinking neurologically should be a basic analytic tool for literary scholars—and I believe that literary neurodiversity studies will only benefit if we encourage more and more researchers to start employing it in their work.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: The Future of Neurodiversity

Abstract This section concludes Literary Neurodiversity Studies by offering a summary of the book’s aims, as well as providing commentary on the future of literary neurodiversity studies—including its role in creating a more neurologically just academia. Keywords Literary neurodiversity studies · Academia · Neurological justice

I have had two primary aims in this book: to offer an account of where literary neurodiversity studies currently stands, and to offer a vision for one possible future of the field. Even if my proposed conceptual expansion of literary neurodiversity studies is not well received, I hope that the overview presented in Chapter 2 will nonetheless prove a useful primer (or refresher) for those interested in literary neurodiversity, and that my reading of Othello in Chapter 4 will perhaps prove an interesting example of one way that it is possible to analyze a text through the lens of neurodiversity. In Chapter 3, I obviously advocated for a radical expansion to the boundaries of literary neurodiversity studies, one that would see all analyses of literary cognition, literary emotion, and literary sensation as joined in its commitment to interrogating how the biological fact of human © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 B. J. Irish, Literary Neurodiversity Studies, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2_5

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neurological diversity shapes literary production, literary reception, and literary meaning. But if we put aside this reimagining of the field, it is still quite possible to speak about other future directions for literary neurodiversity studies, even if research remains more squarely focused on neurodivergence. Undoubtedly, scholars will continue to investigate the neurodivergence (and potential neurodivergence) of literary authors and literary characters; this is a foundational critical method of the field, and will certainly remain so. At the same time, however, it seems that the study of formal neurodivergence is a tremendous area of potential growth. The beginnings of this work were reviewed in my discussion of neurodivergent style, but there’s room for much more in this area; what would it mean, for example, to think more precisely about neurodivergent metaphor, neurodivergent rhyme, or neurodivergent genre? As we have seen, the very idea of reading and analyzing neurodivergently—as an intellectual, theoretical, and political orientation—holds great promise, and scholars in the field (especially those who identify as neurodivergent) can begin to more explicitly set out a series of methodological practices that help us engage literary texts in atypical ways. This nicely aligns with the field’s existing interest in how neurodivergent readers, audiences, and practitioners engage with literature, another area of research that might be further emphasized. And of course, there must be even more intersectional literary analysis of neurodiversity; neurodivergence is itself an identity category, but there are crucial ways that matters of neurodiversity interact with and impinge upon other matters of social identity, such as a race, class, gender, and sexuality. Research on neurodiversity in a variety of fields has typically focused on white, male (and often autistic) subjects; therefore, it is especially important to diversify our analysis of literary neurodiversity and beyond. Although there was occasionally some casual, informal discussion of neurodivergence in literary criticism of the twentieth century, it is only in the last decade or so that literary neurodiversity studies has emerged as a true field of scholarly research. And as I hope was apparent from Chapter 2, the amount of work that has been done already is breathtaking. In higher education today, an increasing number of academics are discovering that they are neurodivergent—and more are becoming comfortable disclosing their neurodivergence, as stigmas (slowly) begin to lessen. One thing is for certain, however: many neurodivergent people working in literary neurodiversity studies today are either precariously

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employed early career researchers or graduate students who face uncertain employment prospects, so it is imperative that academic institutions and academic administrators begin to consciously and actively support the careers of neurodivergent faculty, with no less enthusiasm than they embrace other forms of faculty diversity. More and more of our students, I bet you’ve noticed, are also identifying as neurodivergent—and as awareness of neurodivergence grows more broadly in academia and beyond, more and more people are learning about how to be, and about the importance of being, neurodivergence allies. This is all incredibly encouraging, of course, but there is still vital work that needs to be done. Neurodivergent people still experience marginalization and discrimination in virtually all aspects of life. Neurodivergent children face obstacles at school, and neurodivergent adults face obstacles in the workplace. And we are continually reminded of the vast number of people—including people on our own campuses, employed by our own institutions—who believe that there is something “wrong” with us that needs to be “cured.” Literary neurodiversity studies won’t address all these problems, but it seems certain that increased intellectual and political attention to matters of neurodiversity and neurodivergence will only help us to realize a more just, neurologically inclusive future.

Appendix: Bibliography of Literary Neurodiversity Studies

Abstract This Appendix offers a partial bibliography of existing scholarship in literary neurodiversity studies, as well as a bibliography of general academic resources related to neurodiversity and neurodivergence. Keywords Literary neurodiversity studies • Neurodivergence • Neurodiversity • Bibliography The following bibliography is a partial record of existing scholarship in literary neurodiversity studies; it is followed by a shorter bibliography of neurodiversity-related works that may prove more generally useful to literary scholars. This is in no way exhaustive, and is inevitably shaped by my own strengths and weaknesses as a researcher, but hopefully it will serve as a valuable starting resource for those interested in the field. A continuously updated bibliography of literary neurodiversity studies is available at the website I run, www.literaryneurodiversity.org. I owe many thanks to the people who have contributed to that bibliography!

Literary Neurodiversity Studies Abad, Jason Michael. “The Paratextual Labeling of Autistic-Authored YA Fiction as #OwnVoices: How YA Literary Culture Creates Space for Neurodivergent Authorship.” Disability Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2021). https://dsq-sds. org/index.php/dsq/article/view/7050/5945.

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Adams, Noah. “Autistics Never Arrive: A Mixed Methods Content Analysis of Transgender and Autistic Autobiography.” Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2022): 145–61. Alaniz, José. “‘Mechanical Boys’: Omega the Unknown on the Spectrum.” In Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability, 35–58. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Altschuler, Sari. “Neuroqueering the Republic: The Case of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond.” In American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828, edited by William Huntting Howell and Greta LaFleur, 309–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Andrijaseviæ, Janko. “Literature and Medicine: Asperger Syndrome in Mark Haddon’s Novel ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.’” Armenian Folia Anglistika 5, no. 1–2 (2009): 226–32. Banerjee, Mita. “Towards a Science of the Self: Autism, Autobiography, and Animal Behavior in Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation.” Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 67, no. 1 (2019): 53–72. Barber-Stetson, Claire. “Slow Processing: A New Minor Literature by Autists and Modernists.” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 1 (2014): 147–65. Barron, Judy, and Sean Barron. There’s a Boy in Here. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Bartlett, Bridget M. “Macbeth’s Idiot and Faulkner’s Compsons.” Borrowers and Lenders 14, no. 2 (2023): 139–42. ———. “‘An Idiot of the Newest Cut’: Disability and Social Mobility in Lyly’s Mother Bombie.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 22, no. 4 (2022): 1–23. ———. “Developmental Disability as Material, Metaphor, and Essential Difference in an Elizabethan Morality Play.” In Shaping Intellectual Disability in Early Modern Culture, edited by Alice Equestri. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025. [Forthcoming]. ———. “Reading Romance, and Not Necessarily Minds.” The Polyphony, 2022. https://thepolyphony.org/2022/06/23/reading-romance-and-not-necess arily-minds/. Bartlett, Bridget M., and Bradley J. Irish. “Early Modern Neurodiversity: A Preliminary Research Agenda.” ELH , 2025. [Forthcoming]. Bartlett, Bridget M., Bradley J. Irish, and Laura Seymour, eds. Neurodiversity in Early Modern English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.) Battis, Jes. “‘No Crime to Be Bashful’: Social Anxiety in the Drama of Margaret Cavendish.” Mosaic 52, no. 2 (2019): 167–84. ———. Thinking Queerly: Medievalism, Wizardry, and Neurodiversity in Young Adult Texts. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University (Medieval Institute), 2021.

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Belmonte, Matthew K. “Human, But More So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us About the Process of Narrative.” In Autism and Representation, edited by Mark Osteen, 166–79. New York: Routledge, 2008. Benziman, Galia. “Talking Birds and Talking to Birds: Transcending the Child in Barnaby Rudge.” Dickens Studies Annual 52, no. 1 (2021): 1–29. Bergenmar, Jenny, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, and Ann-Sofie Lönngren. “Autism and the Question of the Human.” Literature and Medicine 33, no. 1 (2015): 202–21. Bergenmar, Jenny, Louise Creechan, and Anna Stenning, eds., Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2025). [Forthcoming]. Berger, James. “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum.” In Autism and Representation, edited by Mark Osteen, 271–88. New York: Routledge, 2008. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Hanna, Anna Nygren, and Sarinah O’Donoghue. “Title: Earthlove—Theorising Neurodivergent Reader Love of A Room Called Earth.” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 70, no. 1 (2023): 25–37. ———. “Moving Through a Textual Space Autistically.” Journal of Medical Humanities 45, no. 1 (2024): 17–34. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Hanna, Monique Botha, Kristien Hens, Sarinah O’Donoghue, Amy Pearson, and Anna Stenning. “Cutting Our Own Keys: New Possibilities of Neurodivergent Storying in Research.” Autism 27, no. 5 (2023): 1235–44. Bérubé, Michael. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Birge, Sarah. “No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010). https://dsq-sds.org/ index.php/dsq/article/view/1067/1255. Bishop, Graham L. “Spectral Animals: Deligny’s Autistic Vision and the Presence of the Immortal (Non)Human.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 26, no. 2 (2022): 179–87. Blair, Jennifer. “Understanding David Eastham’s Neuroqueerness.” Studies in Canadian Literature 46, no. 1 (2022): 229–55. Bock, Sheila. “Folklore and Folklife of Body, Neurodiverse, and Ability-Centered American Identities.” In Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies, edited by Simon J. Bronner, 957–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Bottomer, Phyllis Ferguson. “‘Conversation, or Rather Talk’: Autistic Spectrum Disorders and the Communication and Social Challenges of John Thorpe.”

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———. “The Disabled Speech of Asian Americans: Silence and Autism in LoisAnn Yamanaka’s Father of the Four Passages.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010): https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v30i1.1068. Cho, Soohyun. “Rethinking Genre Conventions: Exploring Detective Formulas and Autistic Stereotypes in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 38, no. 2 (2020): 90–99. Cooper, Tova. “Orbiting the Neurotypical Universe: Aspergian Narratives by Lydia Netzer and John Elder Robison.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 12, no. 4 (2018): 423–39. Crassons, Kate. “Allegorical Investigations: Autism, Applied Behavioral Analysis, and Medieval Poetry.” Literature and Medicine 41, no. 1 (2023): 63–92. Cree, Jose. “The Addicted Self: Habit and Addiction in Early Modern Minds.” English Language Notes 60, no. 1 (2022): 67–81. Cumberland, Debra L. “Crossing Over: Writing the Autistic Memoir.” In Autism and Representation, edited by Mark Osteen, 183–96. New York: Routledge, 2008. Davidson, Joyce, and Mick Smith. “Autistic Autobiographies and More-ThanHuman Emotional Geographies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 5 (2009): 898–916. Dawson, Lesel. “Daggers of the Mind: Hallucinations, Mental Fixation and Trauma in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Early Modern Psychology.” In Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts, edited by Hilary Powell and Corinne Saunders, 221–54. New York: Palgrave, 2021. Decker, Mark. “I Was Trying to Say: Listening to the Fragmented Human Center of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” Kaleidoscope 47 (2003): 6–9. Dekel, Mikhal. “Austen and Autism: Reading Brain, Emotion and Gender Differences in Pride and Prejudice.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 10, no. 3 (2014): http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue103/dekel.html. Dougherty, Stephen. “Autism and Modular Minds in Elizabeth Moon’s ‘The Speed of Dark.’” Mosaic 43, no. 4 (2010): 35–50. Dutton, Jeanne, and Jennifer Miller. “A Little Piece of Evan: Adolescent Literature and the Autism Spectrum.” In Lessons in Disability: Essays on Teaching with Young Adult Literature, edited by Jacob Stratman, 32–52. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Publishing, 2015. Dyck, Denae. “Writing Wisdom: George Herbert’s Synesthetic Poetics.” Christianity & Literature 66, no. 1 (2016): 39–56. Eastham, David W. Fifty Memowriter Poems. Ottawa: Oliver Pate, 1985. Entz, Riki. “Developmentally, Cognitively, and Intellectually Disabled People Are Artists, Not Pet Projects.” Canadian Theatre Review 190 (2022): 32–34. Equestri, Alice. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640. New York: Routledge, 2022.

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Grandin, Temple, and Margaret M. Scariano. Emergence: Labeled Autistic. Novato, CA: Arena Press, 1986. Griffin, Christopher. “Relationalities of Refusal: Neuroqueer Disidentification and Post-Normative Approaches to Narrative Recognition.” South Atlantic Review 18, no. 3 (2022): 89–110. Grove, Thelma. “Barnaby Rudge: A Case Study in Autism.” Dickensian 83, no. 413 (1987): 139–48. Habinek, Lianne. “Altered States: Hamlet and Early Modern Head Trauma.” In Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre, edited by Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble, 195–215. New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. The Subtle Knot: Early Modern Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018. Hacking, Ian. “Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2010): 632–55. ———. “Autistic Autobiography.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1522 (2009): 1467–73. Hall, Melinda. “What Future People Will There Be? Neurodiverse Heroes for a Changing Planet.” MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3, no. 2 (2019): 15–17. Heilker, Paul, and M. Remi Yergeau. “Autism and Rhetoric.” College English 73, no. 5 (2011): 485–97. Helms, Nicholas R. Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters. New York: Palgrave, 2019. ———. “Seeing Brains: Shakespeare, Autism, and Self-Identification.” In Redefining Disability, edited by Paul D.C. Bones, Jessica Smartt Gullion, and Danielle Barber, 152–59. Boston: Brill, 2022. Henderson, Olivia. “‘Like a Dull Actor Now I Have Forgot My Part’: Coriolanus and Shakespearean Autism.” Shakespeare Studies 50 (2022): 126–52. ———. “Vanish, Follies, with Your Mother”: Fools, Intellectual Disability, and Neurodiversity in Ben Jonson’s Masques.” In Shaping Intellectual Disability in Early Modern Culture, edited by Alice Equestri. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025. [Forthcoming]. Herman, David. “Trans-Species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives About Autism.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anna Whitehead and Angela Woods, 463–80. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Herrero-Puertas, Manuel. “The Fall of the Accessible House of Usher: Poe, Berkoff, Neurodiversity.” Poe Studies 55 (2022): 3–31. Higashida, Naoki. Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. New York: Random House, 2017. Hilton, Leon J. “‘The Bright Shapes Were Going’: Disability, Neurodivergence, and Theatrical Form in Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 12, no. 2 (2018): 163–83.

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Yergeau, M. Remi, and Bryce Huebner. “Minding Theory of Mind.” Journal of Social Philosophy 48, no. 3 (2017): 273–96. Zisk, Alyssa. “Critical Autism Studies Beyond Academia: An Annotated List.” Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 5, no. 1 (2023). https://doi.org/10. 9707/2833-1508.1144.

Index

A ADHD, 1, 7, 28, 57 Akhimie, Patricia, 70 Altschuler, Sari, 40 Andersen, Hans Christian, 33 Asasumasu, Kassiane, 6 autie-biography, 30 autism; autistic, 1, 2, 7–9, 11, 13, 14, 21–23, 26–30, 32–35, 37, 41, 42, 44, 57, 60 autism fiction, 21 B Barber-Stetson, Claire, 34 Barksdale-Shaw, Lisa M., 70 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 14 Barron, Sean, 31 Bartlett, Bridget M., 63 Battis, Jes, vii, 63, 64 Beaven, Lisa, 54 Beckett, Samuel, 50 Bef, 32 Benedí, Pilar Martínez, 42, 44 Berberich, Christine, 54

Beresford, Peter, 10 Bergenmar, Jenny, 11 Berman, Sabina, 20 Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Hanna, 3, 41 Bérubé, Michael, 10 biocultural outlook, 5 biodiversity, 4 Blair, Hugh of Borgue, 26 Blair, Jennifer, 26, 40 bodymind, 3 Britton, Dennis Austin, 70 Brown, Charles Brockden, 40 Brown, David Sterling, 58 C Campbell, Neil, 54 Cather, Willa, 52 Cefalu, Paul, vii, 65 Chakravarty, Urvashi, 70 Chapman, Robert, 6 Chen, Mel Y., 10 Chew, Kristina, 42 Chown, Nick, 3 class, 2, 16, 42, 55, 69, 80

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 B. J. Irish, Literary Neurodiversity Studies, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80603-2

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INDEX

cognition, 3, 44, 48, 52–62, 64–66, 68, 71, 75, 77, 79 Costandi, Moheb, 4 Creechan, Louise, 11 Cressler, Loren, 66 cripistemology, 43 critical autism studies, 8 critical neurodiversity studies, 12

D Desai, Anita, 42 disability, 9 disability studies, 12 double empathy problem, 14 dyslexia, 7

E Eastham, David W., 31, 40 Eliot, T.S., 34 Ellis, Jacky [Manidoomakwakwe], 8 emotion, 3, 12, 15, 16, 48, 50, 52–60, 62, 64–68, 71, 72, 75–77, 79 epilepsy, 8, 67

F Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 66 Folkerth, Wes, vii, 63, 64

G gender, 16, 39, 42, 51, 55, 59, 65, 68, 80 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 34 Grandin, Temple, 31, 32 Griffin, Christopher, 40

H Hacking, Ian, 20

Haddon, Mark, 20 Hardy, Thomas, 50 Helms, Nicholas R., vii, 50, 63–66, 68, 73 Henderson, Olivia, vii, 24, 63, 64 Higashida, Naoki, 31 Hobgood, Allison P., 27 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 50, 53 Hudson, Robert, 54 Hustvedt, Siri, 20

I intellectual disability, 9 Intense World Theory, 14

J Johnson, Merri Lisa, 39 Joyce, James, 50

K Kern-Stähler, Annette, 52 Kim, Sue J., 54 Kleekamp, Monica, 40 Knadler, Stephen, 41

L LaCom, Cindy, 42 Lewis Carroll, 33 Loftis, Sonya Freeman, vii, 9, 20, 23, 24, 27, 33, 37, 63

M MacDiarmid, Hugh, 34 mad studies, 10 McDaniel, Raymond, 34 McDonald, Tara, 54 McGrath, James, 4 McKean, Thomas A., 31

INDEX

McWade, Brigit, 10 medical model of disability, 9 Melville, Herman, 44, 45 Miedzianik, David, 31 Mills, Edward, 29 Milton, Damian E.M., 10, 14 mindblindness, 13, 15 Moon, Elizabeth, 20 Mór, Caiseal, 31 Morrall, Clare, 20 Mukhopadhyay, Tito Rajarshi, 31 Murray, Stuart, 23 N Ndalianis, Angela, 54 nervous system, 3 neuro, 3 neurodivergent; neurodivergence, 2, 5–8, 10, 11–17, 20, 21–28, 30, 32–36, 38, 39, 41–43, 45, 48, 56, 57, 59–62, 64, 65, 67–69, 71, 77, 80 neurodivergent style, 34–36, 80 neurodiversity paradigm, 7, 9 neuroessentialist framework, 29 neurological analysis, 55, 63 neurological functioning, 3 neurological identity, 2, 67–69, 77 neurological norm, 6 neurological reading, 16 neurominority, 6 neurons, 3 neuroqueer, 35, 38, 39, 41 neurotype, 28, 33 neurotypical, 6 Newman, Sara, 37 Nygren, Anna, 41 O O’Donoghue, Sarinah, 41 O’ Toole, Jennifer Cook, 31

105

P Petit, Susan, 42 Philippian, Mardy, vii, 20, 63, 64 Pickens, Therí Alyce, 10 plasticity of the brain, 5 Prahlad, Anand, 31 Price, Margaret, 4, 10

R race, 11, 16, 41, 51, 52, 55, 58, 65, 67, 69, 70, 80 Reilly, Brian J., 54 representation, 20, 23, 33, 34, 44, 58, 59 Robertson, Elizabeth, 52 Robinson, Marilynne, 42 Rodas, Julia Miele, vii, 25, 34, 35 Ryan, Madeleine, 41

S Savarese, Ralph James, vii, 7, 37, 42, 44 Schalk, Sami, 10 Semino, Elena, 22 sensation, 3, 48, 52–57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 68, 71, 77, 79 sexuality, 16, 24, 29, 39, 55, 69, 80 Seymour, Laura, vii, 7, 24–27, 29, 38, 44, 61, 64 Shakespeare, William, 7, 15, 24, 27, 37, 49–52, 58, 64–68, 70–73, 76, 77 Shaw, George Bernard, 33 Shaw, Justin, 70 Smilges, J. Logan, 40 social model of disability, 9 Solomon, Rivers, 40 Stein, Gertrude, 52 Stenning, Anna, 3, 11, 32

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INDEX

T Tammet, Daniel, 31 Theory of Mind, 13 Tidwell, Christy, 22 Tomlinson, Elizabeth, 36 U Ulevich, Lisa, 24, 27, 64 Updike, John, 52 W Walker, Nick, vii, 4–9, 29, 35, 38, 39 Walters, Shannon, 42 Whitehead, Colson, 42

Williams, Donna, 31 Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J., 4 Wood, David Houston, 27 Woolf, Virginia, 33, 34 Wordsworth, William, 33

Y Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 42 Yergeau, M. Remi, vii, 4, 14, 32, 35, 38–40

Z Zunshine, Lisa, 49, 53